Divorcing What No Longer Serves

Back last spring, I was into a serious ice cream addiction. I always had some in the freezer at home. I often ate a third to half a pint a night. It even became hard to stop myself with just that much. I joked with my dentist that I had an ongoing close relationship with Misters Ben and Jerry.

Finally, it got to a point this summer when I realized that all that chocolate and sugar were leaving me feeling jittery and uneasy. I really didn’t like how my body was feeling. I knew I had to stop. So I just quit buying it. On occasion I’ll have some for dessert at a restaurant, but that’s it.

Now, I’m old enough to know that most addictions serve as a band-aid to cover our deeper feelings, typically about things we don’t want to face, or have no idea how to handle. So I was a bit trepidatious. But I journal a lot, keep regular counseling appointments, and have deep conversations with my partner and occasionally with a friend.

So, that was one addiction I managed to leave behind.

But soon, I noticed another shift in my habits. When I’ve needed a break from working or completing some daily task, I have routinely resorted to playing games on my cell phone. Over the last few years, I have slowly become bored with first one game, then another. Eventually, I stopped playing a few of them altogether. As I have done that, I’ve been left with a moment of nothingness, here and there.

Nothingness indeed. It’s as if I’m leading myself to actually sit in quiet time, without constant distraction or information input. Sometimes I read news stories on my phone instead of playing a game, but even then, once I have been reading awhile, there is nothing left that I want to read about, so I close the apps.

What’s left? Stare out the window? I remember being in elementary school and told not to stare out the window and pay attention to the teacher or focus on the work on my desk. But staring out the window was not necessarily to examine what I could see out there but more to give my eyes something familiar to look at while I let my thoughts wander. These days, I know I need to ponder and mentally digest what I have been doing without more constant input. I want to open my mind to the non sequitur thoughts and images that seem to spontaneously drop into my awareness from unknown origins.

I’m fascinated by this link between the relentless demand to pay attention in school and today’s onslaught of information feeds. The only difference is that today’s media feeds demand our attention by enticement rather than enforced by the discipline of an authority.

But the result is the same. Constant mental clutter with little time to step back and evaluate what it all means to me. Is there no value in my pondering my own thoughts rather than thoughts dumped into my mind wholesale? What about time to get in touch with my emotional reactions to all this? Am I happy or disturbed? Do I enjoy learning something new, or just feel overwhelmed? Do I have a chance to dream about the future or am I stuck enduring an unending racket of scrambled noise in today’s multichannel world?

I will try sitting with a bit more nothingness, not because there is nothing left to do (or read or watch) but because it’s probably the best way to find me in these quiet moments. The me that would enjoy and be nourished by getting to know myself better.