Climbing out of the FB scroll hole.

On the last day of 2019 I saw one too many political posts on Facebook that pushed my outrage button and realized that I needed a break. It was time see what I'd been missing for 10 plus years while I was in the scroll hole. I needed to go exploring.

January in South Dakota is not an auspicious time to do much outdoor exploring unless you are hardy and have warm boots. Since I'm the equivalent of a Zone 6 on the human hardiness level and my boots aren't that warm my exploration would have to be of the indoor or maybe even internal kind.

This is an inventory of what I have done on my month off of FB.

1. In December prior to the Big Leave I set a goal of reading a book a month because that is what I could manage when I fed my evenings to Facebook. I ordered 8 books to get me through to summer. I read three of them in three weeks.
2. I practiced French with an app. I am looking at going to Paris in the spring of 2021. 
3. I applied to attend a field school in Mongolia this August. The applications for these things always take more time than you think they should.
4. I painted the ceiling in the downstairs bathroom. It's needed it for a couple of years.
5. My husband and I have had people over. It's been fun.
6. I worked on building an online professional learning community. More about that in a bit.
7. I started running again. Slowly and for short distances. On a treadmill.
8. And I washed dishes by hand because our dishwasher broke.

With only a month post Big Leave it's easier to mark what I have done than what I have become but I'm going to take a whack at it. I'm better read, obviously, and less informed about the lives and opinions of my social connections though I have yet to feel like I've missed out. Maybe because we've been quite social this month and I'm actually seeing people in person?

I also feel like my meditation and yoga practices are having more impact on my life. I feel less reactive. It's hard to say if this development is correlated to or caused by my Facebook break since I've been doing a daily practice of meditation and/or yoga for a year-ish. My results could be due to just a general maturing of my practice.

I mentioned above that I'm working on building an online professional learning community. This is a professional learning community of educators and with my newly freed up time I had ideas about how to connect and network us more. Long story short, my initial attempts on a different platform were not what I hoped so I set up a group on (wait for it) Facebook.

I can hear the cries of foul all the way over here. But you gave up Facebook! And you're back! Why?

I did and I am. But I'm back with a different way of using Facebook. When I set up the group, I also set up a bookmark in my browser. To access the group, I click on the bookmark. I go straight to the group and miss the feed. For all intents and purposes, Facebook for me is a stand alone, single topic platform. I gave myself a daily time limit on Facebook using stayfocused.com and have yet to max out my time allotment. 

But why set up a group on FB? Well, because I wanted to go where the people are. And for its many problems, Facebook has people I want to communicate with. If the group doesn't grow or becomes stagnant or inactive, I will consider the group an experiment that didn't quite work the way I wanted and go on to the next thing.

I have always been more pragmatist than purist about most things in life and I include Facebook in that. For now, this is where I'm riding. Impermanence is a constant so in six weeks, months or years I may ride in a different direction. Regardless of where I'm headed my goal is to ride with more equanimity, kindness, and wholeness of being.