quietude

Note entry: 16th September 2023:

quietude. It takes a while for the noise to die down. for the stillness to begin to seep through, and for the echoes in these echo chambers to quieten.

—

For almost a decade now, I’ve made it a habit to step away from the noise of social media. Some years have been more successfully than others. This year, my discipline has taken major Ls and I found myself scrambling at the end of the year trying to figure out how and when to take a social media break before the year is ended.

See, my blessing and my curse is my curiosity. I love to learn, I love to know. And so, I am hyper online. Or more accurately, I am chronically online. My work, personality and world demand a lot of research, reading and consumption of information that it is sometimes nearly impossible to step away once I’m deep inside some random rabbit hole (sometimes I wish I could clone myself, Dr. Manhattan style, because there’s just so much out there that’s oh so very interesting and there’s so very little time on this mortal plane we call home).

There’s always something super exciting to know, discover or enjoy. Whether it’s the rapid advent of artificial intelligence or the internet losing its collective mind over a woman sitting in her garden in the morning enjoying coffee with her husband, or the struggle Olympics that resonate across Africa, from Ghana to Malawi as coups rage across the continent or the discovery of some random super-conducting materials that suddenly overwhelm your Twitter timeline…

“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.” – Sherlock Holmes

Addiction is a frightful beast that starts as one small spot in the peripheral of your subconscious and slowly creeps into your consciousness until it becomes this hulking, angry, and menacing void that slowly consumes everything around you, forcing you to scroll endlessly as your fingers metaphorically bleed across these little boxes of light that hold us captive.

And so every year, I do a mental check to make sure I am still in control.

For the past few years, I’ve been able to take anywhere between one to three months of social media breaks, and I’ve always promised myself that one day, I’ll do a full six-month social media detox. But each subsequent year becomes more… complicated, as my work demands my full presence online, and sometimes personal goals drew me back to the social spaces; whether it is fundraising for school fees for a dear student, or announcing a big win for my organization or just simply the itch to share something exciting that I discovered and felt absolutely everyone needed to see and know.

But then I realized that work was becoming the excuse, and that I was simply fueling this beast that was beginning to control my life. A beast that manifested as endless scrolling, creating a million very important bookmarks on technology-driven education systems that I promised myself I’d get back to but finding myself sidetracked by an adorable toddler echoing “hello mummy” back at a loving parent which then leads to a sudden influx of baby posts on my timeline because the algorithm is ruthless and relentless, but also imperfect because what’s this beef between Cindy and Sheebah and why has Bitcoin’s price nuk… ahh, the Fed is attempting to pass some stupid regulation.

You know what I’m talking about, neh?

Yeah. That.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” – Bilbo Baggins.

And so we find ourselves here and now (you, reader, and I, writer).

24th September.

About three weeks since I shared anything online.

I’m seated at my desk writing this post, because I feel like writing today, and it’s been a very long while since I wrote, and the weather is just perfect for a reflection on quietude, a delightful peaceful little word I discovered while watching “Master Gardener” – itself a fantastic piece of late-night introspective melancholic indulgence (Joel Edgerton’s performance is a beautiful literal man-at-a-desk-journaling calmness yet also cold, calculated violence that somehow doesn’t break the stillness of the captivity you find yourself in) – and I’ve become quite fond of it.

Quietude: (n) the state of being quiet; tranquility; calmness; stillness.

The beauty about taking time off social media is that it gives you back the most valuable and finite commodity known to man: time. And for most people who’ve tried it, there are two very jarring contradictions: one, the jittery withdrawal symptoms as you reach for your phone reflexively every two seconds and two, a singular question that silently screams in the emptiness that now sits in front of you: what do I do with all. this. time?!

And so the most logical thing to do is try to fill that time with time-consuming things: read books, catch up on series, tackle an assignment, hobby or project that you couldn’t previously find the time for which then in itself becomes another addiction to manufactured busyness.

But you know what’s even more difficult to do? It’s the one thing that has been exacerbated and compounded by the increasingly frenetic pace of life fueled by the past century of information overload and instant access to… everything. The thing that hustle culture and self-help-guides-to-success have told us we should never tolerate.

Doing nothing.

“Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will elude, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.” – Henry David Thoreau.

A counter-intuitive lesson that one learns from pushing oneself really hard for the majority of one’s life is that sometimes – and most times – the most important thing one can do for oneself to simply be still and enjoy the moment.

Smell the wind. Watch the butterflies. Stare up at the clouds. Take a moment to be grateful for the things that bring you joy, for the things that give you purpose and for the privilege to be who and where you are, today.

And then, when you’re ready, dive back into the chaos waiting outside the door of your consciousness, hopefully with a little more pep in your step and mind that’s a little bit… quieter.

Happy life-ing.

/king