It’s almost a miracle when I do anything that is truly important to me, like reading and writing and learning, or being available to satisfying friendships.  I don’t know why I get so distracted by ridiculously shallow endeavors, and people.  I would say that scanning the internet for horrible articles about failed restaurants or murderous investigations is a form of relaxation, but it’s not.  In fact, it makes me anxious and usually discouraged.  I do eventually pull my head out of cyberspace, coming up for air so to speak, once I notice again, that I am throwing time away.  

A bigger problem than my aimless online perusing, is my attention to poor-choice friendships.  I can’t decide if I simply find super-weirdo’s (and I say that lovingly) magnificently interesting; or, if it’s as my Dad repeatedly said: “water seeks its own level”.  God, I hated that phrase. Why couldn’t he just say that he didn’t like one friend or another, and cite an actual reason?  Instead, I had to ponder what I had in common with so-and-so, and like water reaching for itself, why I sought to be with them.  Unfortunately, I never changed my behavior toward the un-loveable’ s in my life, so I don’t think his clever approach to discouraging bad company did a bit of good.  

In spite of this self-knowledge and the probability of my low- “level” character, I do find it problematic to waste time as I do.  I choose to get sucked in with some regularity, and sometimes I really regret it.  I think it’s like turning the TV volume way up so that I can’t hear myself think.  My inner-life goes silent because I have some other person distracting me, wanting a ride, or an ear, or otherwise some form of attention from me.  And I willingly oblige, answer the phone, jump in the car, off to the rescue.  While my experiences with, let’s call them kin, can be entertaining or funny or perhaps even meaningful, I am depleted and more often than not, left feeling abandoned and stung, manipulated and silenced.  I do realize that I do this to myself.

About three years ago I started reading books again, one after another after another.  I listen to them too, in the car.  I think constantly about the stories and the storytellers.  I also took a class already this year and I signed up for another one.  I am writing more too.  These activities are a distinctly different use of my time and I feel enriched and rewarded by them.  It’s an immersion into my own head and heart, and an amplification of my own ideas and preferences, which I have struggled to hear for too long.  Being distracted now presents a real conflict for me.  I am beginning to untangle though, gradually, maybe like lake water after a storm, when the mud settles back to the bottom and the clean water reassembles near the sunshine.  I sure hope so.