I have been off social media recently, doing an offline cleanse in the last ten days! My bed has been Mother Earth (well, with a tent) and my ceiling and walls – the moon, sun and stars!
This retreat, which I obtained with funding for my new play (more about that another time!) – has helped me not only mentally but also physically.
Not only have I been much more productive than usual but I have also been able to make a lot of relationship shifts. The move has helped me reflect a lot about both the positives and the negatives of becoming a digital human.
On the one hand, I couldn’t have had the career that I have had without the Internet – living and working abroad, doing off-site postgraduate research, let alone life coaching – all of that has relied on my digital presence. But how much have I lost touch with significant others due to the common reliance on digital? It reminds me that one of my significant others, six years ago, said they would stop speaking to me on the phone full stop because it was ‘inconvenient’.
To be honest the people I’ve been meeting here on the retreat are a thriving community who support each other through life’s ups and downs: they visit each other and phone each other mostly – their reliance on emails and text for communications is less important than in-person and face-to-face relationships.
That’s the argument I make in my PhD: without encountering a rather special group of people in real-time I would never have engaged in their lives enough to want to do in-depth research and find out their hidden stories. I know my argument is much stronger because I engaged face-to-face with my subjects in their own language and in their own environment.
When you’re living by the sea, faced with nothing but the elements, it’s hard not to see your life and other lives in terms of universal time: and also you’re able to make more of every single moment you have, just because of that insight.
It reminds me of two of my favourite quotes by Henry David Thoreau from his book ‘Walden’. The first is, ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in’ and the second is, ‘I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poorest misanthrope and melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still.’
Being in nature has also helped me to focus on doing some of what Byron Katie, in her 2002 book, Loving What Is, calls ‘the work’. At Narrative Life Coaching we go deeper to reflect on how you talk to yourself, and how you talk to others and then we transform the story that you tell the world. The process can seem painful in some ways but there is also the joy of letting go of old ways of thinking and doing and finding out what’s possible for you right now.
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