Late Winter

I'm getting excited for the proper beginning of spring. I went outside yesterday to jump on the trampoline (more fun and less impact than running) and got a bit of a start on the yarn clean-up that needs to happen in the next week or so. Soon it will be time to plant things and start moving things around. 

I think being out in the light and air more and more will help me feel better. I've been fighting some faint infection for a week or so that makes me very tired and run a bit of a fever most days. It's not enough to give me an excuse to plant myself on the couch, but it is persistant enough to be extremely annoying. 

In the spirit of that physical slowness, I've taken a bit of a hiatus from electronic communication. For as little as I perceive that I use Facebook, it is often the first thing I think of doing when I open up my computer. This week I turned it off in support of Evan as he did the same thing. He'll write about it as a way to understand a bit about the Transcendentalists, like Emerson and Thoreau. I did it out of curiosity. Without Facebook as an option, it was fascinating to have that beat to consider what I really opened my computer for in the first place, and go straight to Lightroom or Indexing or briefly peek at my email then LOG OFF of google, so there were no little growly banners fading in and out of my right hand corner. I also, without much forethought, ended up cutting way down on texting. I just lost that need to read and respond immediately. I was slow to answer texts when they came and I did not feel the need to have my phone at my fingertips every minute. 

Not unexpectedly, I both liked and feared this arrangement. I (rather paradoxically, even I admit) enjoy not knowing too much about others/not being known too much by others as much as I enjoy revealing the little bits of myself that I do reveal online. And with certain friends, Facebook actually is a primary way of interacting, for better or worse. In the final analysis though, I liked being free of the beeps and sounds and buzzes that usually bring me running. 

I took this picture while riding in the car and did NOT
immediately broadcast it on instagram. Hopefully some
of the people who might have looked at their screens at that
moment were actually looking at the sky or
taking their own photos and didn't need an
alert to know the sunset was lovely. 

So, it has been a quiet week; a slow week; quite in keeping with all the napping and achy joints. It was not, however, a lonely or isolated week. I've seen the people I wanted to see, done the things I wanted to do, and have been very productive overall. It's a good reminder to continuously figure out a happy medium between feeling ruled by the always-increasing ability to communicate instantaneously with the world and choosing just how much and how often to connect.