Oh dear.

I was messing around with 3 or 4 different screens trying to get a photo in the proper format to put on here and lost my entire entry.

😭

And to make it super ironic, it was a long and rather morbid confession and examination of the digital vs. the analog world.

It WAS getting long. ( ) had made an appearance. I was on a roll.

Alas, its pixels have dissolved into the ether. Or wherever pixels go to die.

Let me sum up.

I'm trying to wean myself off of what has turned into an excess of Instagram doom scrolling.

I wrote this in my morning pages:

Talk about ironic. Temporary is right.

Pardon the scribbly writing. Morning pages are messy on purpose. Julia Cameron would be appalled that I'm sticking this one on the internet. She recommends that we don't even re-read them ourselves !

I have made myself a list of really real things to engage in to depose the Instagram monster.

And I realized that there is a lot of crossover between my digital and analog life. I'm trying to learn to be at peace in both worlds. This is tricky as I am sometimes prone to 'absolutist' tendencies.

I look for watercolor inspiration on Pinterest, follow Zentangle tutorials on YouTube, watch people testing fountain pens and notebooks and ink. All of which have their counterparts in my analog world.

I also play with Zinnia, a digital planner app. It's fun, and you can even print your pages out. I can use my Apple Pencil to write on the page, and even turn handwriting into text, which is one thing I wanted to be able to do decades ago when the technology was in its infancy. There are thousands of images to work with. I put this together in a few minutes this morning as an example of what's available:

Anyway, I was just wanting to make this entry to document my determination to learn to balance these two worlds.

There is a concept in Jewish thought... I will paraphrase it:

'The glory of God is the ability to contain opposites.'

While I'm not comparing myself to God, I AM called to emulate His Ways, so in this realm of my life, I am going to try harder to become a master of opposites.

I want to be able to use my digital tools and not have them do me.

How's that?

(It's sure a lot shorter than all that stuff you wrote before. And for that we can all be truly grateful.)

Perhaps.

You were pretty amusing in the original version.

(Pity.)

I could use some.

(🙄Put up the wild banner and put us out of our misery.)

Oh all right.