Data

 

I was a Trekkie for years, and loved the character called by that name. A much-loved android (before Google cornered the market on that word) who was, if anything, slow-moving gentle and gentle. Always willing to help the human race and learn from them. He was the epitome of the race of androids of whom R2D2 was also a member. We loved them and they saved us time after time. What happened? Now it feels like the android in my desk demands things of me constantly and is often decidedly unhelpful and certainly not very cuddly.

One of the things that COVID has left me with is an intolerance of fast-moving data. Phones buzzing, images flashing, and forms of urgent information exchange causes pressure in my head to increase. Not pleasant but it’s giving me an opportunity to slow everything down.

Most of my life I have been a fast talker, mover, and thinker. Slowness was a waste of time in my mind. After spending so much of my early life in a sickbed, I came out into adolescence wanting to gobble it all up as fast as I could. After all, I never knew when the dreaded disease would strike me again, followed by months of recovery. Everyone else was out there getting their lives together, whilst I was tentatively nursing mine into something habitable.

Asthma drugs didn’t help that either. All based on speed, they used my adrenals as a way of giving my lungs the impetus to keep working. And fried my nervous system. One day at work the inner tension was so great that I couldn’t keep still. I realised that I had taken my medicine twice accidentally. They only way I could cope was to run down the fire escape of the five floors that our office was on the top of, and back up, exhausting the raging energy inside of me. Next visit to the medico, I brought up this fact, along with the reality that I rarely got to sleep and stayed there, like normal people are supposed to do. Doc laughed. You’re on medical speed he quipped. Oh, goodo!

How anyone could do that to themselves for fun escaped me. I thought they were all crackers. But wired as I was, I had little choice. I started to attempt getting off those drugs, swapping them out for less intrusive ones, but the reality was that they were all based on the same principle of putting me into fear/flight/anger/fight in order to survive living. Like a coke head, I spent my life gorging on the data that was constantly feeding my head, and spinning my body, the good side being I could think at a million miles an hour.

What I had to learn the hard way was that information was not wisdom. And I was not wise. In my attempts to gobble down experience, I made some atrocious choices, that I still shudder to think of.  Then I had a breakdown. Knocked on my arse, I had 18 months to learn how to trust, accept, and slow down. And a lifetime to work on it.  The foreign concept of boundaries came into my life and began the process of rehabilitating me, one conscious choice at a time. What boundaries began to teach me was the difference between knowing things and deciding if they were right for me, drawing a line between what’s possible and what’s advisable for me at the time. Funny idea!

All data is not equal.  Since those days in the late 80’s, data has become extremely available to us all. We no longer have to go somewhere and look up information in a book, on a library shelf a few suburbs away. It’s right there at our fingertips. Google ensures that we have a never-ending supply of the stuff. I love Google. My hungry mind has a readily available online library to check up on anything I want to. That does not solve the question of why do I want to. It doesn’t matter who sung that song, and in what year. What does matter is the life force that I expend looking it all up.

Physics tells us that everything is information. All the cells in our bodies carry their own data. Data flies around in the ether, not just on the internet, but in the collective unconscious. Everything that exists is exuding data; the tree I wrote about in What the Tree Told Me, shared its data with me because I touched it, staying with it until I understood what its presence was all about. About for me, that is. And that’s the key. None of the information flying around is of any value except in as much as it resonates with the being that is receiving it as well as sending it. That’s called relationship. Connection.

Getting connected is a buzz word these days, referring mainly to social media. Connecting up with this that or the other because it’s the thing to do. So much so that we are literally drowning in information, grabbing at it as if our life depended on it. We have been made to feel that it actually does depend on it. If we miss out on anything it could be critical. But it isn’t. It’s spawned another buzzword or is it acronym: FOMO. Look it up! No, don’t. Guess.

It has been noted that time seems to be getting faster and faster. Or is it that so much happens in the time-frame that it feels like its speeding by. Just like watching the scenery in a car going faster and faster. But the scenery isn’t going fast. The car is.  It’s the same distance from here to there no matter how fast we are traveling. When I was ‘coked out’, was I really moving as fast as it felt I was? No. It was just the information that was spinning out of control, as I internally tried to keep up with it. My post-COVID experience was a reminder of that awful feeling. It was a message to slow my attention down, grab onto the handrail of life and ground into the reality that was me sitting in a chair looking at my dog.

Why is this happening to the world we inhabit? I guess there are many reasons. Some of them are historic as those of us that were brought up poor are encouraged to want what the ‘rich’ have always had. A desire to ‘catch up’, perhaps? But into that comes the desire to sell us all the things that our parents and grandparents couldn’t afford. The wheels of commerce, and their need to sell more and more faster and faster. However, you cannot buy that which you don’t know exists, so it’s imperative for the seller to inform as many as possible that they can’t live without the product that they never knew existed.

In the hurry to inform us, everything accelerates. The advertisements on TV speak faster and faster so as to get as much persuasive information across to us in the shortest period of time they can manage for the money (because it all comes off the bottom line). Every space possible is used to fill our consciousness with product ideas: aeroplane smoke trails, apps, Facebook (in-between articles we are interested in). Indeed, anywhere they can catch our eye. All psychologically planned to get us to buy more, faster. The faster we spend the more they can sell us and the harder we work to fund it all. Meanwhile our poor adrenals are assisted to keep up with substances galore, all designed to make us feel as if we are on the end of disaster if we don’t check this out, order that, or have a new one of those.

So we are drowning in information, most of which we could do without, but without the boundaries provided by our senses how would we know, because our mind only dishes up what its told to. If it hadn’t been for that awful feeling of being out of control and wired up, I would never have spoken to the doctor about it. He saw no reason to ‘worry’ me with the details of the side effects.  Now it’s the opposite. Now we are all addicted to copious substances, they are accompanied with lists of warning we never read because what’s the point? We are going to use it anyway, right? And the wheel spins faster and faster. Everything’s out of control, while the weather patterns mimic the energy of everything else.

What are we going to do? Get COVID? Seems like it. Maybe on some esoteric level that is its purpose. I remember the calm the day after lockdown came into force; no cars on the street, no pollution in the air, no sound of rushing people. To me it was bliss. But I had spent decades slowing myself down. For others it was crazy-making. But like it or not, we all had to stop for a while. I had the time to complete a book, read novels, and just be, in the quiet that transformed the world. However, enforced pauses never work. Like all things, change must come from the feelings within that alert us to the deep needs, trying to express themselves through the busy-ness of buying and selling our souls.

So here we are again, on Jay’s favourite bailiwick. We have to slow down enough to feel our senses, taking the time to honour them, even though they may go completely against the zeitgeist of the time. Because if we don’t we will crash and burn, just as I did in my Nervous Breakthrough. If you are juggling balls, you have to keep them in the air. If you keep adding balls and juggling faster, you will inevitably reach the point of your capability limitation and they will all fall down. The plague spawned the nursery rhyme and game Ring-a- Ring o’ Roses in which with A-tishoo we all fall down. COVID's trying to warn us we are reaching the Limits of Growth (you can look that up if you like) as a species. What to do? Pull back, step off, slow down, simplify. Take time to do a deep dive into your feelings, letting the truth surface. It won’t kill you. Only speeding on past the STOP sign will have the potential to do that.