*When the world gets too noisy, let’s come here. To the place where the horses graze and nudge and nicker. To where the hay sticks to your clothes and the sun shines down on grassy fields.
To the fields where we can be wholly present, where time slows down a bit and the beauty of the world comes into focus.*
The world has always been both incredibly beautiful and incredibly terrible. It has always been a masterpiece of despair and hope, a confluence of happiness and sorrow.
But, now, in today’s world we are positively inundated with information.
Research is saying that screen time is changing our brains. All of ours. Young and old alike. And one of the most interesting pieces of research says, we experience information overload from scrolling, reading the news, and answering our emails and texts. And that information overload registers in our brain as threat.
Our brain is convinced, that we are actively under threat every day because of the amount of information available to us.
It’s too much to decipher, too much to unwind.
When we believe we are under threat, the mechanisms in our brain shifts and we start to interpret the environment around us as threatening. We start to pick up on the threatening tone of the stranger walking past us, we notice the overwhelm and the difficulties of our day. We move away from connection and into protection.
We have trouble connecting to ourselves, our intuition, our decisions, our lovers, our families. Instead we protect. We turtle. We distance ourselves and isolate.
One of our biggest jobs of being human is reminding ourselves to not only track the threats. We must track the beauty. We have to work hard to choose connection.
We must dig deep into redirecting our thoughts, as if our own brains were the angsty toddler or the wild horse. Bring ourselves back into our bodies, into the moment, gently and purposefully. Remind ourselves that for every terrible thing, there is something beautiful.
Viktor Frankl is one of my absolute favorite individuals for this reminder. A man who found meaning in a death camp of the holocaust. A man who held onto hope in a situation entirely bereft of any decency. He states; “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”
How can you increase your ability to track beauty? How can you trust that doing this will not threaten you- but instead will allow you to access balance in today’s very busy, very noisy world?