I avoid the news like plague but it trickles. Instagram is my only social media and I use WhatsApp sparingly but with a mastery of the vocabulary.
I know the lingo so thoroughly that it’s hard to believe the woman texting you back is the one who borders on the obsessive shunning of company; heck I was there when the lingo was being designed and developed – when the code to convert the keystrokes into emojis were conceptualised.
I avoid the news like plague but it trickles to my Insta feed. I avoid it because am obsessive, I would then cry and be consumed and rage and rebel and make the monster in my head – almost as big a monster as things actually are and I will be honest; am not equipped to deal with it.
I avoid the news like a plague because it will consume me entirely. Because I want to believe that the world still has something good, something pure, left. I want to believe that all my sweat and blood in bringing up another human in space full of love is not for nothing. If nothing, it will at least build enough groundwater reserve for the times when the world shows its dark dirty murky messy monstrosities.
To create that space of light and love and strength and character and integrity and poise and resilience and ability-to-find-silver-linings TAKES everything. Every ounce of fight one has against one’s own darkness. To compute that space where things finally find their place, it takes every drop of glue of will one has to put back together one’s own brokenness
It takes shattering of self and reconfiguring into someone – the child, the future individual will look up to and look back and find strength in. In the smiles and the sermons, in the goofy dances and the ice cream binging, in the cuddles and the chaos of existence, in the time-outs and the story times, in the breakfast and the bravados. Fill it with love enough to withstand the loss, many losses that’s life is made up of. Because love and loss go hand in hand. Even if it’s the loss of minutes bleeding into hours or loss of the glorious fragile flower to the earth beneath it.
So, I avoid the news like a plague – it is. Because whilst the monsters make sensational headline; and yes, it is required we report for the greater good of knowledge will set you free but does it really(?) and goody two shoes look pedantic and contrived (some definitely are just that) - I rather collect the tiny mundane moments in my jar of alchemy – which turns them into fireflies.
Copyright©Nee