"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace."
--Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (ESV)
I've been pretty silent online over the past couple of weeks, only commenting here and there on things and keeping up with certain obligations. Partly that was due to a major certification test I had last Saturday, but mostly because my life had gotten out of balance.
I spent a lot of time online, far more than is really healthy. While I value my online friendships deeply, at the end of the day it's the friends and family I have in meatspace who matter most. I see that I was using my online activity to escape my own grief that I've been feeling over the past six months. I've lost my father, my mother-in-law, my favorite aunt, and I may not have my mother much longer either. Almost all of the senior generation of my family is gone in the space of a year. My response has mostly been to keep a stiff upper-lip and carry on, because my family needed me. Sandy's losing her mom was particularly devastating for her, and the children have no frame of reference at all. Neither did I at Alex's age when I lost my brother John. I'm still dealing with that 37 years later, and my kids have lost so much more in so short a time.
Some people go to alcohol or drugs to escape reality. I went to the Net. And I buried myself there in that semi-reality state. Social media is a great tool to get in touch with people--I've met nearly my entire high school graduating class via Facebook or LinkedIn, and several people from college and fandom as well. But it's a very poor tool for interacting with people.
Only about 10% of our communication is verbal. The rest is all non-verbal: facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, spacing, etc. Online we lose all of the non-verbal communication that makes human interaction so rich for most of us. Most people recognize that and are able to take it into account.
For me the situation is different. I do not have the same ability to read social cues as other people. I can fake it for a while but it is an act, and an imperfect one at that. Putting me online is like putting a fish in water: those factors that are a hindrance to me in the real world don't exist there. So for me it's very very easy for the line to become blurred. And that's exactly what happened about two weeks ago.
I violated the trust of someone who is more dear to me than almost anyone else. It was well-intentioned, but if the road to Hell is paved with good intentions then I'm in charge of the Infernal Highway Department. The point is that I treated my online interactions with a good deal more intimacy and confidence than was really appropriate at the moment. For that I apologize. I saw the need to step back and reassess matters.
The title of this post comes from a 1982 film by the same name. It's a Hopi word meaning 'life out of balance' or 'a state of life that calls for another way of living'. I was first exposed to the film in college but at the time I didn't have the life experience to truly understand what the filmmaker was communicating. I mostly fell in love with Philip Glass' outstanding soundtrack. About a month ago I found the movie free on demand through my cable company and watched it two nights in a row. It's not for everyone's tastes, but it does make you think.
One sequence in particular sticks out for me: a series of pictures of large cities from space, compared to pictures of printed circuit boards. Unfortunately I can't find a legal clip of that sequence to attach here, but here's a link to a similar sequence by another artist that gets the point across:
If cities are microchips, then we're all just electrons completing the circuit. It's interesting to note that space allocation on a circuit board is often referred to as 'real estate'. Unfortunately the Net makes that even more true than it was in 1982. Life out of balance, indeed.
When you start thinking of people as electrons, it's easy to dismiss their feelings. Electrons are defined as probability functions--we can only determine where one is likely to be at any given time due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. In a sense that's true of the people we meet online: can we really be sure of who or where they are, or even if they exist? Is what they tell us true?
Relationships online are built entirely on trust, which is what makes them so vulnerable. And I violated that trust. I let my perspective get out of balance.
So I spent a lot of time offline these past couple of weeks refocusing. I played with my kids, and my new puppy. I cried a lot, and I talked a lot, and while I'm not 100% back together (and probably won't ever be again) I think I see things more clearly now.
I'm sure my father was talking to me through that movie, delivering a warning. He was a big fan of Native American culture (and actually carried some Native ancestry--as do I--though not enough to really matter for anything beyond family pride). And he was an even bigger fan of living in the real world and keeping things in balance. He always tried to warn me when I was going off the rails.
So while I'm not going offline completely, I am going to place a more firm emphasis on the relationships I have with people I've met in person, either past or present. I have some new friends who have been extraordinarily good to me, and some old friends who have returned to my life after many years. I have a mother whom I will be talking with a lot more, and a brother and sister-in-law who have become closer over the past few years. Most of all, I have a wonderful wife and two great kids who need me in meatspace. Cyber-friends, I'm not abandoning you completely, but you are going to have to take a back seat while I breathe a little and find my balance again.
That said, I'm ending my self-imposed social media blackout today. A time to mourn, and a time to dance...
