Doodle For Us!
I am being rewired. It is difficult to stay away from the screen, the ping, the endless loop that makes me feel connected to the world. Yet I often get the sense that real life is a distraction to our device relationships, instead of the other way around. I am slowly being robbed of knowing what to do with myself, uninterrupted, when I am alone. When things get quiet and slow.
It didn’t used to be this way. I remember a holiday in an era when the most imperative thing to plug in was the string of Christmas tree lights, or the turntable, for a marathon spinning of a newly opened present: The Beatles’s Rubber Soul.
When I do choose to reconnect with what brought me such quiet fulfillment in the past, a spiritual muscle memory awakens. I make coffee in the quiet of a winter morning, feeding the birds in my backyard and the cats in my kitchen. Later, I may write in a journal, start on a sketch or collage, read from a stack of books. Real books, with a scent and weight that no Kindle can compete with. I may take a walk, or do a bit of restorative yoga in my living room.
This is sensory overload I can handle. I am grateful for a quiet chance to both remember and discover the essence of who I am.
—Sharon Watts
For more of Watts's work, click here.
Readers: Try it! Send us your doodle. Send it to cynthiaconradkling@gmail.com.
