My email inbox often gets terribly overwhelming. I do my best to communicate with friends and family regularly. But personal notes can get lost when there are floods of appeals from organizations asking me to sign a petition and donate money and take action and show up at an event and sign another petition and then they send me a thank you email for signing it, and oh, don't forget to give money! MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, ASPCA, American Humane Association, GEMS, the Brooklyn Museum. My inbox is also jam packed with all the fun and exciting things I can do, buy, see, do, eat, buy, do, buy, buy buy! Groupon, NYC Daily Deals, Living Social, The Bowery Presents. Things I love. Causes I support. Experiences I desire. Communications that are scrambling my brain...
Oddly enough, raising money for a cause and managing communications are in my job description. So I can't ignore the Internet completely. I can't just make the words go away. My work day consists of sitting at a computer and type, type, typing away about children and parents and families and lawyers and social workers and family court and abuse and neglect and sad stories and happy endings... Email is unavoidable. I get Google alerts that I can't ignore. I need to know what's going on in the world and the country and the city... I need to know what's happening in the courthouses down the street and in the government buildings in D.C. and in the offices down the hall. These things are not expendable.
But what about the rest? Perhaps I need a break from the emails, the sites, the blogs, the news, the feeds, the banter... I felt a serious sense of relief yesterday when I cleaned out my friend list on Facebook without remorse and walked away 30 individuals lighter. I also felt a sense of accomplishment when I reorganized my Google Reader into three categories and then alphabetized them all. And instead of feeling finished, it made me itch to organize my bookshelves into fiction by author and nonfiction by subject. So many items to read, so many people to meet, so many ideas to acknowledge, so many things to learn, so many words to try to cram into my head... SO LITTLE TIME.
The best lesson I ever learned is that the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. So you should just keep learning and reaching for as much knowledge as you can attain. But I suppose the more time that passes, the more you realize how little time there is... You have to accept that you can't learn it all. I sure as hell can't read it all. Perhaps I just need to disconnect completely. Less Facebook? Sure. Ignoring the more fluffy stuff in my Reader? Done. Unsubscribing from a few email lists? Probably necessary. Writing more instead of passively reading? Now there's a thought...
I suppose I could just read more books, though not surprisingly, when I'm not reading things on the Internet, I'm reading a book instead. And I end up reading a hell of a lot of books. But goddamn, even that stresses me out, because with every book I finish comes the realization that I'll never read them all. There are simply too many words in the world. And I don't know where to begin. I also don't know where to end...
I guess right about here is as good a place as any.
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