Lilim 017 — This is How I Want to Talk to You

A Photograph #

I went back to the lake today—tempted to call it dagat as people do here. I’m capping a week of living without Facebook and Messenger by communing with water. I am also going back to work tomorrow—another intense editing marathon for five days, which means no long walks in the afternoon, only short tours on the streets around my place, around 30 minutes—an hour if I am lucky. So I walked today. My pedometer computed 5,000+ steps from my home to the lake. I took the longer cut by using the inner streets to reach the highway rather than the main road. The walk is quieter that way. I try my best to avoid the noise when I walk. Actually, I try my best to avoid the noise wherever and whenever I can. It’s the only way I can give myself a chance to hear myself.

It’s the reason why I left Facebook and Messenger this week and honestly contemplating leaving them for good. There are things only heard in silence—usually the best things, the important things. And I heard a lot of that this week.

I don’t know what exactly provoked me to leave. I just knew I can’t take it anymore. Was it the feed or the chat app? I feel like the latter has gone out of hand more than the former. The feed can be tamed by unfollowing people and no one would know. The chat app is an entirely different animal—rabid, too extroverted, too authoritarian. If you seenzoned people, they’ll get hurt; if you don’t even read their messages, they’ll get hurt; they want you to respond immediately. And it’s not their fault entirely. It’s just how the app was designed. We just follow how it was designed.

Compare that to the silence you get from reading this email. I won’t know when you read this (until I check the report in Mailerlite). I don’t anticipate a response from you. I don’t get hurt if you seenzoned my email. No one is rushing anyone. No one is asking for anyone’s attention in real-time. This email can just be an ambient thing that passes through your attention and is deleted or archived after the experience.

This is how it was designed. This is how I want to talk to you—to anyone—in written form.

A Thought #

The most critical decision of all is what you do at this moment.

You have multiple projects and multiple actions under those projects. The consolidation of these projects and actions could lead you towards your purpose.

However, there is only this moment. The most critical decision of all is what you do at this moment—this action.

Because there is only a single list of actions, whatever you choose to do at this moment is your priority. The act of choosing one thing tells the world that this is what’s important for you at this time.

Once a choice has been made, the next critical step is to make peace with your choice and let go of what you didn’t choose to do. This is only possible if you make sure that what you choose to do is indeed what you need to do.

A Quote #

Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation.

— John Updike

A Question #

What can you do to lessen the noise, so you can hear yourself more?

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