The Sanity Project
3 weeks in!
** Be sure to check out the quotes at the end of the post!
So, I'm 3 weeks in now on what I've started calling my "sanity project."
Not turning on the Internet – i.e. to access email, Facebook, Substack, "news" – until the afternoon. I wrote about this as a turning-over-a-new-leaf project here.
******
It's going well!
The issue being, once I hook up to the latest onslaught of the latest world "news" & commentary in a world that has gone/is going utterly mad – I immediately start to feel unsettled. Anxious.
I actually feel this in my body. I noticed it years ago now – long before the Covid era & all of its beyond-the-beyond madness – that I would go to Facebook, say, read a post or two (the people I'm “friends” with share meaty stuff, not cat videos or pictures of their perfect lives/families), & pretty soon – almost right away, actually – I would become aware that I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.
So my awareness of the anxiety attached to my ingestion of "news" & social media posts goes back a long while. (For the record, I find Twitter/X particularly jarring, so I've just mostly not gone down the Twitter path, though I've had an account for more than a decade.)
It's just taken me a really long time to finally do what I ought to have done ages ago: put strict limits on my consumption.
Why am I prioritizing staying "sane"?
... or at least as sane as a human can be in times that are palpably insane in the extreme, & seemingly not on a trajectory to become less so anytime soon?
“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?” – Ursula K. LeGuin
Well.
For one thing, it just doesn't feel good inside when I get feeling all spinny. It's uncomfortable. Unpleasant.
For another, I'm a mother (& grandmother), & the last thing my kids (& grandchildren) need is for me to go off my rocker.
Right?
After all, I won't be much use either to myself, or to anyone else, if I've flipped my lid. As an old saying goes. 🙂
Right?
So.
Hence, my sanity project.
It's pretty crazy out there!
I drafted a posting a while back called 'A world gone utterly mad,'
with a number of vivid examples of the craziness.
But I'm not going to bother posting it, 'cos my focusing too much energy on the stuff that's loony & enough to make us all loony along with it, likely won't much help me – or my readers.
Let's be honest.
We all know it's pretty cuckoo out there.
There is a lot of drama.
I, for one, find drama very exhausting. Draining.
I know some people kind of unconsciously enjoy drama, I guess 'cos their childhoods were full of it, so it seems familiar & perhaps comfortable to them. But I'm not one of those people. Yes, there was a decent amount of drama in my own far-from-ideal childhood ... but as an adult? I enjoy calm, thanks.
And?
There is very little, if anything, I can do to tone down the world's ramping insanity – so I'm opting for more substantial blocks of time spent focusing on activities I find grounding, rather than crazy-making.
Grounding activities - in my little world
Not spending much time on my cell phone, which sits on Airplane 99.9% of the time (this recent item seems to confirm my conviction that the less time I spend near or on my phone, the better)
For the record, I do all my Internet stuff on my laptop, not my phone. And I don't get "dings" all the time notifying me of new emails or Facebook messages. That would be far too distracting for me, with a brain that is frankly already far too squirrel-like for my taste.
Walking is a key part of my sanity strategy – has been for years & years now. (I'm so addicted to walking, there's a whole page of great quotations about it on my other site. Here.)
Reading
Nature in all its forms
Writing
Spending time with loved ones
Basic household chores! (e.g. the other day I managed to dust two places in my apartment that go seriously shocking lengths of time un-dusted. Feels so good!!)
I'm sure gardening is very grounding too; I just happen to live in an apartment, so it's not an option in my life.
How has it been?
It's been very good!
It's working very well, in the sense that I feel less crazy & less stressed than when I spend too much time online & on social media.
There have been some blips!
Like the morning I thought I could go online ever-so-briefly to order a book, & it morphed into one of those all-too-frequent Web site snafus – going round & round in circles, dealing with some AI bot that did not help me sort out the nonsensical password problem (or whatever it was; mercifully, I've forgotten the details); a problem that an actual human being could've sorted out in about one minute flat. We have all been there, no?? 🙁 🙁
Or the weekend morning that went off the rails with a zillion texts back & forth among a group of us in my apartment building who've been dealing with a frustrating, infuriating, ongoing heating system debacle for the past six months. Argh.
Seems like craziness is in the ether, no??
Let's not forget that I live in a big, busy city, & on a pretty busy street. So. There's a long list of nonsense I could let drive me right up the wall if I'm not pretty careful.
I did learn years & years ago now that "what we focus on, expands," so I know it's up to me to not focus too much on the nutty stuff.
A few people I've spoken to have agreed with me that my remaining sane (well; vaguely sane?) is liable to be helpful to the people around me.
So. I'm just putting on my own oxygen mask, as it were
... the way we're told to do by flight attendants, any time we go somewhere on a plane.
Since we can't be of any help to others around us if we can't breathe ourselves.
Right?
There you have it.
Feels to me like my little sanity project is helping me. So I'm gonna stick with it!
Janet
p.s. now that I think of it, another thing I do less of in recent times is trying to convince other people of stuff they don't want to know. A lot of us did a lot of that in the heat of the Covid madness, heaven knows. Mostly we found it didn't work out too well (heh heh; slight understatement, eh?) Folks didn't seem to be too open to learning what we'd learned about all the nasty fear-mongering agenda/vaccine propagranda. No point in beating my head against a brick wall now, trying to inform people about stuff that might protect their health, their lives, their children's lives – when they pretty clearly really just don't want to know. I'll admit it: that's a tough one for me! But I'm getting better at surrendering to the fact that there's ever so much people really just plain Do. Not. Want. To. Know. (sigh.)
A few quotations ... 'cos I love 'em so much! 🙂 🙂 🙂
“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?” – Ursula K. LeGuin
“Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche (quoted in Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner)
“Wisdom has two parts: (1) having a lot to say; (2) not saying it.” – Sign spotted on a church billboard
“Do you have the patience to wait ‘til your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving ‘til the right action arises by itself?” – Lao-tzu
“Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it’s the only thing.” – Albert Schweitzer
“Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.” – Karen Kaiser Clark
“Only connect. This is how we make meaning. This is how we learn to think as Nature thinks.” – Gregory Bateson, anthropologist
“Every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.” – Robert Anton Wilson
“When a majority of people in any society share the same array of delusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies go mad. History is filled with those examples.” – Dean Koontz, The House at the End of the World
“Men…think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” – Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
** more great quotations about insanity
And finally, some humour!
