The digital octopus leaves none of us alone. In every waking moment is the need to follow, reply, post, share, like and tweet. All of our energy is directed into the endless quest to be constantly connected for it is through connections that we are known and not be to known is to be.. what? Left out? A non-player? It doesn’t bear thinking about it. So we don’t think and quickly rejoin the whirling fizz of communications to keep up with whatever it is we’re supposed to be keeping up with.
It seems to me that the uncoordinated forces behind this drive are the enemies of silence.
Silence is a threat because it is a space that cannot be known. It is not waiting to go online or considering the value of the next tweet. I define silence as a specific place where what you do doesn’t matter.
Let me type that again – ‘where what you do doesn’t matter.’
I have asked clients what it would be like to choose silence and it has confused them. Men in particular are very driven by the need to be productive and silence has no place for them unless it is tied to a form of productivity. In the same way the idea of doing something that ‘doesnt matter’ also breeds a befuddled look. As one client said ‘surely everything matters in some way.’
It may be worth considering the value of a life focused on a purpose in which even silence has to be useful. If your focus is continually on what is demanded of you how will you ever know your interior? If the needs of the digital octopus are allowed to become greater that your own desires and impulses how will you ever know rest?
You still have the choice to stop and find some silence. Get in touch with that’s going with you and consider some of your own needs. If you don’t the digital octopus will and and there is little chance that he’s slowing him down – especially when your feeding him with your own responses.
Choose silence for you and literally no one else.