A Social Media Break

I am stepping away from social media for a time.  
 
I feel a privileged guilt doing this. 
 
The hostages held by Hamas in Gaza can’t take a break from their trauma but I can stop reading posts about them. 
 
Our country will continue to be infiltrated by terrorist organizations paying our citizens to march for a Global Intifada and I can shut down my feed.
 
Some government officials can turn their backs on the only democracy in the Middle East and I can deactivate my Instagram and look out my wall of glass and onto the mountains in the winter morning light. The best light.  
 
An International Kangaroo Court of (In)Justice can hear a case filed by a country that courts a terrorist regime and I can sit with my young puppy and my old man, 21-year-old cat and the only thing I can choose to worry about is his care and comfort in his old age.
 
But still I will worry about more. 
 
I will seek out fair and honest news reporting (hard to find). I will speak with my cousins in Israel and listen to sources that feel honest and clear. I will support organizations that I believe make a difference. And will continue to have conversation and, yes, discourse, with others because engagement is essential to the health of our humanity. 
 
But this, this social media addictive drug is a dopamine hit that is hitting too hard.  I need to turn this off.
 
I can turn this off.
 
I am blessed that I can turn this off.  
 
I do not take this for granted. 

~

This world, it seems, 
is upside ended.
And pulls my heart 
till quite extended.
The flux and flow, 
I tumble with it.
And feel I need 
a self-timed limit.
This page will be here, 
still for viewing.
But visits are 
my soul’s undoing
And so I take a pause.
For now.
Until my body
does allow.