Put Your Phone Away.
Are you honoring your humanity?
The Light of the Shadow (1939), Yves Tanguy
This message is simple, but you still need to hear it and feel it and live it every single day: These constant distractions are not good for you. These alerts, these texts, these blasts of media, these portholes into terrors unfolding far away, this gutless slop, this digital chaos, these soul-destroying AI summaries, these tiny hearts, these angry comments, these measurements, this indifferent, undiscerning, aggressively unfair madness.
These forces erode your sense of yourself and disrupt your understanding of reality. They sever your connection to the people around you and annihilate your ability to see the beauty of who you already are, what you already have. They obscure who can see you clearly, who is here, who loves you, who wants you to thrive. They destroy your memory and your confidence and your hope. They shred your connection to the natural world. They cloud your sight and block your view of your purpose under heaven. They prevent you from noticing the brilliant light of the vast, shifting sky above you and the brilliant light inside your vast, radiant heart.
When you wake up in the morning and scold yourself, when you allow your most neurotic and negative thoughts to take hold, when you fall prey to endless hassles and distractions, when you never look out the window at the sky, when you walk to the train without smelling the moisture in the air, when you forget to honor the natural world, which presses on your skin and asks gently that you feel what’s here, you refuse to honor your humanity, you reject yourself, you reduce your life to a series of trivial and arbitrary struggles that add up to nothing.
Honoring humanity sometimes involves disrespecting the structures and mazes and subhuman voices and technologies that pull and claw at your attention as you navigate your day. Respecting your own humanity sometimes includes blocking out the people and places and things that are out of alignment with your values, principles, and purpose under the luminous sky. Welcoming the humanity of those around you with an open heart and inviting the divine love that’s etched into their faces into your senses and allowing the pure intentions pulsing through their blood to ignite your spirit sometimes demands pushing away the bad habits and invasive digital blasts and clumsy interruptions that trick you into believing that everything outside of your skin belongs in the same junk heap.
Honoring humanity starts with honoring the natural world: how nature rustles up to you inside the faintest sounds and smells, how it alerts you to what matters and what doesn’t matter at all, how it lifts you out of despair even when you forgot that it had that power, how it pulls at your desires even when you thought they were dead and gone, how it plants you in this moment and keeps you grounded firmly here and whispers in your ear:
YOU ARE STILL ALIVE.
You’re still alive.
Honoring humanity naturally includes dishonoring the forces against humanity, against nature, against love, against pure hearts aligned with each other in spite of everything. Respecting humanity necessarily includes surrendering to the radiant light of the sublime around you, allowing that divine light into your senses, humbling yourself in the face of that brilliance.
Talent is the ability to let the divine into your pores, to yield your ego’s demands to the sublime majesty around you, to allow the radiance of this world to touch your weary soul, to give your body to your most sublime intuition and create light from the scrap heap of your broken, wayward, insecure, perfect life.
Confidence is the ability to let go of total control, to allow this chaotic world to float through you without trying to dominate it, to give your love to the people who have nothing but hate for you, to forgive and spread love and honor humanity, which means respecting nature — your nature and the natural world.
When you block your own senses with tiny screens and constant chaotic disruptions, you block your own glory. When you make yourself into an obstacle to the truth, when you deny the reality of your divinity, when you ignore the beauty of this crazy fish tank where you live, when you stray from the path of love, when you turn your face away from the love that offers itself to you without hesitation, you dishonor the natural world and disrespect your own humanity.
Put down your phone. Live your life in the open air. Honor humanity and leave these tiny windows onto the suffering of perfect control behind. Humanity is imperfect, nature is imperfect, you are imperfect, your truest loves are imperfect. Yield to the reality of the sublime around you, and leave these fantastical trivialities and obsessive illusions behind.
Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Humanity is on your side when you align with nature. Nature is on your side when you align with humanity. Let your magic and all of your talents take root by grounding yourself in this moment, respecting the vastness of your heart, and honoring the beautiful potential of everyone around you. Believe in what you are, and share your radiance with those who’ve lost track of theirs.
These words are beyond perfect….its all such a struggle. I always say I liked life better before the internet. My 20- something kids look at me like I’m from another galaxy when I say this. I mean it to the depths of my soul.
I go out without my phone a lot these days. Whole Saturdays where it just sits at home on the charger. I do have my apple watch so I can get messages or use maps, if I need it. Thinking about leaving it at home more, and instead of a phone, carrying a small digital camera in my front jean pocket to take pictures. That's all I need.
If I do have my phone with me, I will not want to but still read it while I walk around the city. I will look at it while walking the dog. I have this sense of let me get through these emails now, so I can do other stuff later. It's hard to resist. I've trained myself to be as productive as possible, now time to reconsider the value of that.