Hexed

Some days all the noise hexes me. The tweeting, the Facebook posts, the YouTube videos. All that self promotion that is at once a benefit to leveling the playing field in this new interconnected on line world we live in and an annoyance. What is real and what is made up?

Some days I get hexed. I start comparing myself to what others are doing.
How did she get that book deal?
How come his blog got picked up by the Huffington Post and mine didn’t?
Does everyone really need to voice their opinion about everything?
Isn’t tweeting that you actually managed to find ten minutes to meditate a contradiction of statement?
Or do you just think it’s cool to tell people you meditate even though you clearly don’t fully understand what that means?

Some days even when I shut all the noise off I can still hear it in my brain as if my internal computer pressed the repeat button and it got stuck.

Some days I get hexed, thrown off my own course by the spell all this constant chatter has created.

I am frozen in my tracks. I get no work done. I feel helpless in how I will be heard about the noise. Does it mean I have to start saying stupid things and making sure they go viral? I hope not, because in that case I will never be heard.  Not that I promise to never say anything I might regret, but it is not my style to spew falsity and to speak just for the sake of hearing my own voice.

Some days I get hexed and  my only recourse is to take a tip from Thoreau and create my own little version of the woods he went to live in. Except instead of Walden Pond I bundle up and head for the Reservoir. Cell phone off. No iPod buds in my ear. No texting. No tweeting. Just me, the quiet and the oasis that is Central Park.

Do you get hexed by all the “noise” out there?
Do you think there is too much “noise”?
How do you differentiate between what is real and what is made up?
Do you think you have to say “stupid” to be heard?