Internet

Being in China without ready access to the internet made it simple to focus on the present, observe my thoughts and write about what I was experiencing.  I need a strategy to continue thinking and writing now I’m home and have broadband and 4G on tap.

The internet has been a compulsion ever since I had broken feet in  Buenos Aires.  I would hobble down to the locutorio, where I would pay 1 peso per hour to fill in the time, searching desperately for what was next.

Through this period I was looking for my spirit, but ended up down a rabbit hole of crazy new age personalities and eventually conspiracy theories. It was thrilling to peel back the layers of deception, but aside from adjusting my world view, it didn’t help me to find my place in it.

Eventually I had to admit defeat to teaching Argentines to tango – my feet never got better – and I headed home to mum.

Here my frantic searching caused great consternation and some fighting, but I was sure my answers existed within the world wide web. All the information in the world was at my fingertips, if only I could find the right search term.

My life followed a path, which I could only see when I looked backwards.  I had jobs and careers and houses and homes and relationships and a marriage, but I still didn’t have a purpose. I took opportunities as they presented themselves, and focused on achieving short term goals.

I continued to use the internet, and my desperate pulling of information subsided into allowing it to be pushed onto me as social media gained popularity. Ironically, I only consumed it, and rarely contributed. No one, I thought, was interested in the mundane details of my tiny life, even as I read the blog of a cattle rancher’s wife, the daily details of friends on Facebook and the minutiae of random strangers’ posts on Reddit.

Thus my life until the day I came back to  Beijing. Without Google, I had to talk to strangers, ask for directions, risk my poor language skills. Without the internet I had time to observe, to contemplate, to allow my imagination to take me to places in myself I might have never have seen. Without my constant distraction, I have been able to hear myself again.