After a year of pandemic isolation, you would think I’d have had enough of silence. As someone who is always “in her head,” I feel like during all this alone time I’ve cycled through just about every thought a person could have related to our current predicament, not to mention the state of the world, and the future of all of humanity.
So, imagine my surprise when I was reading The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur by Christine Kane and recognized myself in her passage about “input addiction.”
“Input demands the incessant, knee-jerk activity of ‘checking,’” she writes, and goes on to explain that the minute we experience even a moment of boredom or downtime these days, we immediately reach to fill it by checking our phone or e-mail or the latest news update.
I’ve prided myself for years on not being addicted to my phone or to social media or any of the other harmful distractions we hear so much about. It was alarming to realize that during the pandemic, I had slipped into that addiction without even realizing it. I’ve been checking my e-mail obsessively hoping for . . . what? An e-mail that would “save” my business, or offer me something to focus on other than pandemic challenges, or just lift my spirits? I went from checking social media only briefly in the morning and evening to scanning it several times a day. I kept my phone near me at all times in case I missed a text.
There are lots of reasons why I struggled to feel creative this past year, but there’s now no doubt that my coping mechanism for feeling “stuck” was to reach for something to distract my mind. If I was reading, learning, even ruminating, I felt like at least I was doing something productive. I mean, I wasn’t just staring at the wall all day. Now I’m realizing it might have been better if I had occasionally stared at the wall, if I hadn’t been so terrified of the boredom I was feeling and had learned to sit with it instead.
“Sometimes our thoughts need space to move around, to find their own connections, and to become what ultimately lands us successfully on the other side of that (creative) tension: insight.” Christine wrote.
I thought I was doing that this past year when I would make myself meditate. But I was really just crossing meditation off my to-do list. Not only that, I put all kinds of…
