Sunday Snippet: When Enough is Enough… Turn Away…

I was chatting with a friend the other day about childhood holidays to the Cederberg… which is a beautiful desert like mountain range up the west coast. Let me say that again… hot and dry… very like a desert. We took our kids their for a visit a couple of years back – in the spring. But we used to go their every school holidays and in the heart of summer it got really, really hot; really, really dry… a desert really. As a family we did a lot of hiking and every time we got to a river or a water hole of any kind my mum would take photographs. At home the walls were covered in photographs of beautiful streams, heaps of dragonflies floating above wonderful waterholes. PhotoAlbums filled with pages and pages of incredible photographs of water droplets caught on grass stems. And so many friends would say, it looks just like the English country side… green and lovely, wherever you look. While her photographs were real, they didn’t represent the reality.

The internet is pretty much like that… I walked this avenue home from school week in and week out as a child, I never noticed how stunning it was, because it was my everyday. I did notice how long it was… that was my reality. However, as an adult I only very occasionally pass by here and every time I am struck by the beauty of it… And the internet is just like this. We tend not to post the ordinary… the momentous dinner, the extraordinary pile of dishes, yes. But the ordinary not so much. The thing is after blogging all about blogging last week, I realised just how much time and effort we put into the internet and how even that can become well… exhausting. And how sometimes we just totally need a break…

I’ve noticed that power outages ensure a great break from the internet and we always feel refreshed after them… after the initial frustration of not being able to get our intended work done. To all my internet friends today, I highly recommend a break… leave your phone at home, read a real book, just enjoy the ordinary. I’ve totally stopped looking at my phone in the mornings… I leave it “charging” till we are finished with school and the days when school flows over into the afternoon… then my phone stays untouched till we are done. How true is Ecclesiastes 1:8 “All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing: – we know it, we could spend all day on Pinterest looking at lovely things, but unless we say no and turn away… it just becomes wearisome.