Unintentionally, I decided to spend this holiday weekend without watching any videos.
As I say, there was no governing logic to this decision -- the primary motivation, in fact, was simply that I’m at month’s end on my cell phone plan, and data has become a bit more valuable as a commodity.
Staying away from YouTube has been easy enough. In fact, it coincides with an actual intention I had consciously made -- to read and pray far more that I watched or listened.
A single man who lives alone, I’ve noticed -- especially at night before bed -- that I have a somewhat unhealthy craving to have human voices accompany me in my solitude.
For a couple of years that seemed okay -- there were so many topics I’d wanted to learn more about, and always a multitude of intelligences to hear from, such that not only was I getting information on topics, but also on style of speech, rhetorical techniques and whatnot, as well as dialogical maneuvers.
But it was becoming apparent that the more I listened and watched, the less I was reading, and the less attention I had when I did read.
Further, as ought to have been obvious to me, most of the information one gets from such sources may be fine for getting a few roughly-hewn ideas or takes, but suffers from a serious lack with respect to nuance or subtlety (and what subtlety was there I was quite possibly missing as I was straying too far from the written word to guide my minds’s eye).
And, even worse, the nightly habit was cutting into my quality of sleep, and was preventing me from having the depth of Dream I might otherwise enjoy.
Praying the Liturgy of the Hours throughout the day (which, in some instances, includes time for silent meditation), as well the Mass and my morning and before-bed practice, has helped me to slow down my thinking in general, and (bolstered by my silent and vocalized reading) getting me back to a natural state where reading is easeful and rich, and where my concentration benefits from consistent exposure in contemplative states.
And that, alongside the boost in reading in general, has allowed for my Dream state to become much more lucid (although not in the way you’re thinking -- I’ve yet to have intentional will or conscious agency in the dreams), and often symbolically revealing.
Even better, I found that it was incredibly easy to journal lengthfully this morning, and late into the entry I wrote a sonorant lyric poem in meter with no trouble at all.
But what caused me to want to write this piece was the extent to which I’ve noticed that all of online media is beginning to become more and more video-based.
Scrolling through every platform, I find myself needing to consciously avoid video.
It would seem that the already literacy-threatening nature of social media is becoming even more pernicious in its insistence on retreating from the written word.
Something to consider.
In the meanwhile, I’m two days in to my official fast, and look forward to delighting in the remainder with hopes for the emergence of more poetry.
May all be well with you. May you be at ease, and free from suffering.
Attentively,
Aaron
