Here’s one man who does not, and why.

Via Rhonda

Give Up Watching the News

Me? I never did “watch the (TV) news.” Didn’t watch TV ever, actually. Something about its vibration has always been anathema to my spirit. Even as a kid, I could hardly bear to be in the same room, or even on the same floor, when the television was on.

But I did scan through headlines in the daily paper. Endlessly, from the time I learned to read. To see if the world was going to end that day. And if it wasn’t, then I could go outside and “play” or rather, pretend to play, because it’s really never been possible for me to just BE HERE NOW without the “here” encompassing an extended field, this entire one-minute-to-midnight, nuclearized globe.

Nor has it been possible for me to BE HERE NOW without the “now” expanding — to infinity.

In my 40s and 50s and 60s, I “watched the news” in the form of the New York Times. Jeff and I got it daily, thanks to a many-year gift subscription from his father. I was grateful that the paper didn’t arrive at our yurt in Jackson Hole Wyoming

until the news was already a few days old, which, of course, is an eternity in the snap crackle pop of digitized culture’s continuously frissoning blather.

Since the “news” was already “old,” I could read it without the usual gasps of horror, relief, or frantic anticipation.

Even after we moved here to Bloomington and Jeff died, and the NYT was delivered on the very morning it was printed, I was still hooked to this voluminous print media, and even more so, because it was once again, “current.”

Then Jeff’s Dad died, and with him, my subscription. I switched to the internet, discovered all sorts of ways of looking at “the news,” parsed by all sorts of brilliant, or disgusting, or obsessive minds. WOW! Within a few months I found myself starting this blog. That was over four years ago.

The only time I’ve really been “without” the now much differentiated/kaleidoscoped internet “news” (which yes, is usually the olds, in the sense that things come and go the same way over and over again, and all with their cycling of fear and dread, horror and brief relief) since then was just over two years ago, when I was in Thailand and India for two months. I didn’t miss it a bit!

I do realize that it’s a “fix” this daily dose of mine. But I try to educate my perceptions and intuition to be able to ignore or see through most of what I set myself up to come across, and parse the rest, putting together pieces of (and analyses of, and commentaries on) “the news” that interest me and throwing them in unusual lights.

The various contradictory stories and analyses of “the news” also force me to open my mind into multidimensionality. Otherwise, how can I imagine how any of it can co-exist? I’ve just about come to the conclusion that 1) IT’S ALL REAL, and, as husband Jeff used to say, “Just remember Ann, 2) WE’RE MAKING IT ALL UP!” BOTH.

Meanwhile, yes, I’m also right here, right now, grounding and centering my 3D body’s tiny portion of earth in Bloomington Indiana, working with the land, its people, and my own unruly unconscious habits that keep me bound, in one way or another, to “the news.”

Yes. No matter how much I try to think I’ve kicked that habit, I have not. What I have done, is learned how to use “the news” as a foil for awareness, always noticing, for example, when I move into fear or alarm, when I feel relief, and why, etc. What draws my curiosity is most important, and I keep on going there, because, after all, what are we human creatures, if not curious about the whole world, both the one at hand we can see and touch and feel and the bigger one “out there” that we co-inhabit in our collective imagination? Such a feast!

P.S. The above piece also put me on to a remarkable website that I subscribed to immediately, loving its title, first: thoughtmaybe.com.