To the Void

As an author I'm big on social media. I work in marketing so these platforms are a daily necessity whether I like it or not. I'm someone who gets connected deeply - to networks and platforms - to people and places.

But, sometimes, in order to reset your own internal systems, which may have become corrupted by life's malware and cookies until we're ready to go all blue screen of death, we have to disconnect. Reset to factory settings and see how our machine runs then. And that's freaking hard.

Disconnecting from computers, from people or places or things that keep us down, whatever they are, often becomes necessary for the spirit not to drown. Drawing away from the cloud of confusion or negativity, those things that make us lose our own hearts, identities, sometimes even our sanity, is not a new human experience. We all have to do it from time to time, whether by force or by choice. Or both.

In all that obsessive connection, when we've too long held our breath under water, we can end up ignoring the solitary, organic world, the grass under our feet and the wind on our faces, our own hearts. From our tight clouds of non-perspective, we often lose ourselves. We lose our emotional well-being, and then, of course, there's unhappiness and pain. Being too connected to a microcosm and disconnecting from our own bodies and needs plus the larger world around us creates a nasty bubble effect, constricting our minds and our breath.

These days we can become so focused on a much smaller life in our heads, a vast but limited world. We get sidetracked easily by things that feel satisfying in a more strangling way. We fall into them and balance disappears. We create dense woods of our own unwitting creation. Then, when we pop our heads out of the trees for long enough, and if we dare to step outside them entirely, we have to relearn who we are all over again. This re-emerging from a kind of mental blindness is commonly called The Void...and I've known this state of transition from one place to another very intimately. It's a deeply uncomfortable, even gut-wrenching place to be. Ironically, when we disconnect from distractions, from comfortable emotional traps, from things that cause us pain or limit our lives, it can often feel completely awful. At first, anyway.

Disconnecting from whatever limits our hearts requires getting to the point of ferocious self-parenting, of disciplined choices where we have to fight our own fear to combat limitations and connections that constrict. Jumping into that dark disconnection from the old and expanding to the new takes massive loads of courage and faith. We want the woods that are familiar. We even want the angry bears and the poisonous nettles and the cold, stressful nights because the sense of emptiness that comes with a trek into The Void is a new kind of agony. We like our smaller, familiar sufferings. We remember that the sun felt great in the woods...sometimes. All that green we were drowning in was intoxicating... sometimes. But The Void offers all of that plus the rest of our lives.

Disconnecting hurts. It's a merciless growing pain. And it's entirely self-inflicted and self-sustained. On purpose of all things. The Void feels like crap. There's no way around it. And it takes ginormous dedication not to turn around and grope for a rope in the dark that would tie us to things that no longer serve us. 

Disconnecting is a commitment to ourselves to connect again, in a bigger, stronger, wiser, healthier way, with the rest of the world.