Sprinkled with Stones

     When I was growing up, my sister and I would sit in the decorative rocks that surrounded our house, sifting through the stones, searching for interesting ones. Pink ones, blue ones, multicolored ones; ones that showed fossils of what was surely a prehistoric lizard, ones that showed a million years of sediment gathering in a single space. Our dad worked with rock quarries, too, so sometimes he brought rocks home for us -- some were smooth and chipped off in thin sheets; others were crusty with layers of other rock or even concrete. Some he'd break open with a hammer, and we'd look over his hands, hoping he would reveal colorful crystals. By the time I was ten or so, we had two ice cream buckets full of stones sitting in the shed where we kept our bikes. We wanted to keep them separate, in their place of honor, revered as the beauties we believed them to be.

    As an adult, I started picking up interesting stones whenever I was out and about on adventures of different kinds. I kept them on my knick-knack shelf next to my framed family photos, my tiny china teacup, my penguin statue. The stone on the footpath in France that looked like an eye gazing back up at me as I finally felt God walking with me. The flat worry stone from Spain, found on a day when worries were hard to find. The handful of tiny stones from the beach on Lake Michigan, from that afternoon when we knew our friendships were changing but still held hope that they would last. 

     I wanted to keep something from those days that I could hold -- something tangible from those places that held so many fleeting memories, so many lessons, so much emotion. I wanted to be able to point to one and say, "That's the evidence. That day was real. I was there. I won't forget."

     Now I've been collecting these stones for over a decade, and they sprinkle my home in a dozen different places. Some still grace my shelves for all to see.

     But I find others in the most unexpected places. Next to my jewelry box, all mixed up with my hairpins and makeup brushes. In the bottom of a tote bag. On top my bookshelf in the corner of the living room. These stones still tell stories of lessons learned and adventures had and the spectrum of tears wept to laughter shared. But I can't remember which of them came from which place anymore.

     The path on the day I spent quietly watching the deer work her way around the pond.

     The top of the Great Wall of China.

     The banks of the lake after we'd all just floated there together, laughing, when hours felt like days. 

     Did I bring one home last summer?

     As I held the rough, pink one in my hand and thought of the smooth, brown rippled one in the next room, I knew it doesn't matter where they're from anymore. Doesn't really matter which one is which. They're now as much a part of my home's landscape as they were once a part of the places where I gathered them; this is now where they belong. They still strike a chord within me each time they catch my eye, and the memories -- whichever they happen to conjure -- are so woven into who I am that I no longer need to hold the stones just to relive the moments.

Fasting and Connecting

With my earbuds in, my breathing was louder than the cars driving by behind me. I closed my eyes and listened to the bird songs instead of the playlist cued up on the other end of those earbuds. When you looked plugged in, passers-by don't often strike up a conversation.

But plugged in I was not. Am not. Have not been for a mere week and a half.

What's the withdrawal timeline for social media? When will the symptoms of jitters, mild to moderate loneliness, and a general fear-of-missing-out, the dreaded FOMO, subside?

My social media fast is simultaneously liberating and painful. As one friend put it, I've given up being social, which explains the boughts of loneliness that have settled like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup after a bag has broken -- dark flecks in what is otherwise clear.

I'm no longer feeling the knee-jerking need to check my phone every three minutes to see if someone has posted something new. To see if someone's pet has done something funny, to see if a child whose parents I know has discovered four-letter words, to see if a friend has visited an event that I wish I had attended, too. I'm not watching the world around me through the lens of Instagram filters, and I'm not wondering how many likes a post about my cat or my students might get. I'm not thinking about how to share my own exciting news of being called "professor" for the first time, or when I should post to maximize the number of reactions.

That's what it had come to. That's why the fast was so important.

But there are still moments when I fear I've missed someone's engagement or pregnancy announcement or prayer request. And fear is not an exaggeration -- it grips at my chest, increases my heart rate, puts a pit in my stomach the size and weight of a bocce ball.

All of these visceral reactions have continued to flare up despite the phone calls from loved ones sharing their exciting news with me and the text messages from friends just asking how my day was or telling me about theirs. See? I want to tell my addicted brain. They didn't forget you.

And yet -- that's the real fear underlying all of this. Who might forget me?

******************

It's been five and a half weeks since I've been on Facebook or Instagram. 

Some days I don't miss it at all. Days when I would have been highly sensitive to how my potential posts would have been woven into my adventures, my interactions, my insights are now spent living right there in the moment. Some days I leave my phone in a different room and don't think to check it for the latest updates for hours. Some days I can even refrain from rushing to my phone if I hear a message come through.

Other days I still yearn to connect with everyone out there. Well, yearn to feel connected -- which doesn't always mean I'm actually connected with those people. Scrolling does not always result in authentic connection. In fact, I've found the ratio of time spent scrolling to time spent truly connecting is 100:1. That's just an estimate, of course.

Instead, when my people-homesickness settled into that space just under my collar bone, when my chest felt heavy and my brain started over-analyzing every detail it could cling to, I reached out for that authentic connection with people I love. Called. Texted. Emailed. Called again.

Prayed.

Listened.

Woke up and prayed some more. (Because that's also a real struggle.)

And I have learned from these intentional connections. I am loved. I am not alone. I don't have to know all the details for those details to fall into perfect place. I still love intensely -- it's not just a line on my Facebook profile; it's really who I am.

I don't yet know what it will feel like to scroll again the Monday after Easter. I don't know if I'll fall back into old habits, if I'll look for connection just to find a stale substitute but call it good enough. But I have hope that I might be building the stamina to simultaneously let go and reach out.

***