EVERY THOUGHT YOU CAN THINK

     Mercury moved into Gemini, and the mind is hyper-activated. "Communicate, communicate" goes the little voice in your head. 

Think, think hard, think harder. And here is the internet, that beguiling devil, here to serve you. The internet is just so damned interesting. Every thought you can think can be found there. You can take a ride on Facebook and never come back to your senses.

You can forget you have a body. Lost in the mind, you can bang around down streets and highways of ideas. Very exciting, like most addictions are. I confess I am quite attached to my internet connection, and the amusement park of the mind it offers.

     My mind will not solve my problems, because my mind is the problem. Since moving to Minnesota 35 years ago I have learned to keep it simple. I picked up the local style of plain-speaking straight talk, the art of understatement, as in "Cold enough for ya?", and "a bit brisk out there today".  In 12 step groups I learned basic unadorned honesty, and even a little humility. And then in 1998 I discovered the internet, and I've been tripping out ever since. I've probably learned more from reading on the internet than I did in four years of college. And connected with more people than I could possibly visit with in person.

     When is something you do an addiction, and when is it just something you like to do? If doing it is productive, meaningful, and doesn't hurt you or anyone else it's probably not an addiction. 

When thinking, communicating, and internet absorption takes you away from touching, from hugging, from paying attention to the people you love and you live with, distracts you from your feelings, and sets off spasms of checking your email or your Facebook timeline every few minutes, then it's time to admit you've gone over the line. And in some ways our whole society has gone over the line. Can we ever bring ourselves back to mindfulness, to the quiet presence of actually being here with each other? This is a good time to take responsibility for the precious gift of the kind of thinking that comes from the heart, and the kind of communicating that connects us soul to soul.