Building Your Own Spaceship

i’m pondering the question:  

how do we move from being retrievers to infinite containers? 

i have been thinking long and hard about our youth.  in thinking of them, i cannot help but think of my own youth –   it was different.  specifically, i feel like those of my generation and before had the gift of space.  once we left a place, those people were no longer accessible.  further, how we acquired knowledge of who we were, what was acceptable by society, and facts in general were harvested in our families, in the newspapers we had access to, from libraries, volumes after volume of encyclopedias,  and from our imagination. there was space to not know and not knowing was OK.

today a person could be on and engaged with others outside their home 24/7.  when we have a question, we can just type it up, even an approximation of it, and are given a list of answers – at times conflicting.  we see things we are missing out on, from all over the world. we see the lives of our friends, admired folk, and the world in squares, minute long videos, and 280 characters.  it’s not the whole picture.

and yet, we take it to be. our minds create a narrative of who a person is by creating a continual thread of post after post. so much is missing from this –  often the struggles and the vulnerable things humans go through to get through. what’s missing is the unpolished and more importantly, that the unpolished is OK. you may not matter to the masses, but you matter to me.

since this aspect of humanity is missing in the majority of cases, we measure ourselves by it and it becomes an unattainable mission.  and even when we “attain” it, even when we get our first million followers, get a blue check next to our name, get featured in a retweet or mention, we feel empty and disconnected.  it is about this point that our sense of self becomes defined as a retriever whose existence, sense of worth, and self-knowing is based on likes, clicks, and posts.

we all live in the past a little. i can also say there is an age when you start saying, “things were better when…”  in this case, i can totally stand by the statement, “things were better when we could turn off.” unplug. silence. hangup. 

when we had those gaps between things, our minds had the space to clear all we experienced till then.  we could pick and choose what fit and what was extra.  now, we need to create that space. not everything is for us nor our bar to measure ourselves by.  i am not saying let’s get rid of social media, i’m saying can we use it with intention and center ourselves, imagine ourselves beyond the box and reel.  

can you allow yourself that kind of expansion? how will you design your spaceship?