SCATTERBRAINDUH
September 30, 2014
The Brain has left the building! Yes, folks, the Doodler has lost her noodle. Some of you may have been thinking this for a while now, but mark it down–in September 2014 the noodle of the Doodler irrevocably cracked into itsy bitsy pieces and flew the coop, leaving behind a simple Duh sound. Duh, duh, duh, DUH. . . .
Let me explain with the Duh of a brain that remains. The Twilight Zone of motherhood and womanhood and every other hood that has dared to take up residence within my body over the years has descended in all its eery glory. I no longer live one life in the here and now, I live lives all over the there and then and here to come. My FREEdom of this year’s one word journey has taken me to the land of SCATTERBRAINDOM. I live one life at my house in Corbin, another life in my nanny house in Corbin, one in Wilmore, KY with my oldest daughter and her family, one in Chicago with my middle daughter in her little apartment, one life with my youngest daughter on the campus of Belmont University, several lives with close friends hither and yon, a life with my old dog under the shed, a life with family in Kansas City and Arkansas, a life with my Compassion children, a life on Facebook with friends, acquaintances, people and adorable creatures I do not know at all, a life on Ruzzle making words, words, words, a life in my unwritten novel, a life in the novel I’m reading, a life with all the hurting people on the news, a life in prayer about all my other lives, and half a life trying to sleep at night without thinking about all my other lives. It’s a little exhausting trying to keep up with all that business!
Is anyone else out there experiencing this problem? I feel oddly, utterly, inexorably **S C A T T E R E D**. Technology is great, but by making it so easy to keep in touch with anyone in the entire world and to stay informed about everything happening all over the planet, it tends to crowd the brain with way more than people used to deal with in a single day. Inner peace doesn’t thrive (at least for me) with all this noise coming from every direction. I realize I could turn all the techno gadgets off and find some peace, and I do that sometimes, but I run the risk of missing something urgent that I need to know about so I can help someone. Maybe I’m just too old and frumpy for this modern lifestyle. I don’t even have a smart phone, or I would for sure be over the edge.
Actually I don’t think this constantly tuned in life is good for anyone, especially children. It’s all too much, too fast, too loud, too sedentary, too brain numbingly constant to be good for the old folks’ minds, much less growing and maturing brains. Other kinds of connections are not being made when the mind is filled with noise and pictures coming from a screen. It’s like the too much television of a few years ago, only on a little carousel of freakishly enchanting animals sitting right in our hands.
What shall we do, what shall we do? Perhaps we should FREE ourselves for an hour, or a half day, or perchance even a FULL DAY each week from the tyranny of the omnipresent dinging and bluttleoops of technology, the never ending newsreels of violence, hatred and argumentative dissection, the inanity of goofy videos, and the underpinning of distracting background noise in our heads. Maybe we should spend an hour outside listening to birds singing and watching trees waving in the breeze. We could even read a real book while we’re out there, conjuring up in our mind’s eye the characters and events being described. And maybe we should invite a child to join us before the virtual world of technology becomes the only world that child knows.
Now for those of you who are curious about the progress on our building project, here are some photos!
The garage:
The outside of the sunroom on the back of the house:
Inside the sunroom, which is more like a mini-ballroom right now:
Happy Autumn to everyone!