Creating Space

The other day I read this quote by Ezra Taft Benson:

"The biggest business of any life is making decisions. While one of the greatest gifts of God to man is … the right of choice, he has also given man responsibility for these choices. … We put our own lives in the direction of success or failure. We may not only choose our ultimate goals, but we may also determine and decide for ourselves, in many cases, the means by which we will arrive at those goals, and by our industry or lack of it determine the speed by which they may be reached. This takes individual effort and energy and will not be without opposition or conflict."

Superimposing this quote onto all I've been thinking about technology and how I'm using it has left me thinking about how I'm creating space in my life for my goals, and trying to make sure that I'm using technology in a way that is helping me reach those goals. I definitely felt a little pang of regret when I read the quote feeling like I have not really put forth sufficient industry towards reaching my goals often in the past, and it gave me the motivation to renew my focus on what I want for my future.

One of the themes that the Bored and Brilliant podcast and the End of Absence talked about a lot was distraction, how we are pulled in so many different directions at once, and how really our brains aren't that good at multi-tasking. So the past couple days I've been trying to focus on doing just one thing at a time. I guess so often I just feel pulled in so many directions at once, and it's easy to feel overwhelmed. So when I'm doing the dishes, I try to just do the dishes, and finish them, before I start doing something else, or even thinking about doing something else. When something I need to do comes to mind I try and push it aside and just focus on what I'm doing at the moment.

It's harder than I thought it would be, and I still get side-tracked a lot, and obviously it's not always possible to just do one thing and finish it before getting pulled to something else, but it has given me a little more space for just thinking, thinking about life, and goals, and sometimes nothing particularly important,  but it has actually been pretty nice. And when I am able to really focus on one task I do feel less frantic.

I think the highlight for me was today when I was feeding Simon his bottle, and I just sat, and watched him eat, and studied his little eyes and face, and just soaked up the feeling of holding his tiny body close to mine, and it was really nice. It's made me really want to be more present and mindful, and it's definitely a habit I want to keep working on.

I'm still working on more ideas for creating space for working on my goals, but I guess I'm starting with mental space :).

Book Thoughts - The End of Absence by Michael Harris

I want to use this blog to kind of keep track of the books I read this year, but I'm not really sure how I want to do it, so I'm trying a few different things here...

This week I finished "The End of Absence" by Michael Harris, and while I'm not sure I whole-heartedly recommend the book, I did like the thought-paths that reading it started me down.

It has definitely left me evaluating how and why I use the technology I use, and the technology that the boys use. Grant has started me listening to a podcast called New Tech City, and in a funny coincidence the week I've been finishing this book the podcast started a "Bored and Brilliant" challenge, encouraging people to step away from their technology a bit to create more space for boredom, for being creative. So it's been kind of fun to be reading this book and also listening to Manoush Zamarodi, the voice of New Tech City, talk about the benefits of less technology in our lives.

I have been thinking about the constancy of information that we are surrounded by in this age of google and wikipedia, and how I really do spend less time trying to figure things out myself, and am so quick to just ask Siri when the boys ask me a question.

One thing he talked about several times was how the youth of today are so inundated with technology that they can't really separate themselves from it, they will never have a separate identity outside of technology that those of us who grew up before the age of the internet had as kids. While I can see his point, at times it felt a bit over blown to me. My kids have time with technology every day, yes, but I, and most of my peers, did too. Sure, it wasn't the internet, it was just TV, or Nintendo, or archaic video games, but growing up in the 70's and 80's wasn't like we went from a complete dearth of technology to being completely submerged in it.

I guess I think that while today's technologies may be more prevalent and more accesible and probably more addicting then the technologies of yester-year, but I knew plenty of kids growing up where the T.V. was on constantly at their house, and teenagers who wore their walkman like it was part of their clothes, and I think people found plenty of ways to avoid thinking deeply then without the internet. I think the primary problem is a choice to put away the easier mental tasks and commit to digging into the harder ones, and while the technology of the day may provide more ways to avoid that, it's an old problem, not a new one.

But I guess the constant availability of So. Much. Information. does really make us need to be much more mindful of what we are using and why. So it was a good read overall.