I can’t stop thinking today about my friend Jan, who died nearly seven years ago.

Breast cancer.

She taught music at my school and lived two houses down the street from me. We shared walks, meals, and moments.

A teacher always, she started each class with “ponder this.” Why do we climb mountains? Can there be justice? What is joy? She’d ask her students to think and respond. And if their discussions took longer than she’d planned, fine.

Jan began the first choir at our school, sharing her beautiful voice with all of us and inspiring her students to share theirs. But she was so much more than her voice. Today I ponder how far our influence can travel and the impact it can have.

I hope she knew how much she was loved.

I noticed a tweet from Dean Shareski today, indicating he was beginning his eighth year as a blogger. Curious, I checked the month I began. March 2004, a month after Dean began his blog.

Not as organized as Dean, I’ve lost much of my earlier writing. While becoming a runner, I shared my ups and downs of training and racing on a running blog, where I wrote nearly every day for three or four years. I deleted it in 2009 when it no longer served a purpose. The blog I began with my students (linked in the sidebar) no longer exists either. And the blog I began as the instructional tech coordinator for my school morphed into scmorgan, which you are reading now. (I did lose many of the earlier posts when I moved from typepad to wordpress.)

These days, though, I am finding myself struggling to share. I remember waking up one day last summer, moving through my morning routine of checking twitter, Google reader (and then Google Plus) as I had my morning coffee. Suddenly, a thought flashed into my head. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Closing my laptop, I headed out the door and took a long walk. I wish I could tell you I had some epiphany. And, no, I didn’t immediately stop using social media tools. But these past few months, I have found myself slowing down to a crawl.

I value the friends and connections I’ve made online, but I have tired of the conversations and this need to always be “on.” Instead of joy, I feel stress. I know, that’s my problem, not social media’s. Yet, I wonder….

It’s ironic, isn’t it? I am sharing about not wanting to share. I suppose that is part of the letting go.

As I struggle to figure out to what extent I want to live online, I look for the transformative learning that will occur for me. Time will tell whether I will feel a need to reconnect on a regular basis. As Thoreau said, “Things do not change; we change.”

 

 

 

 

 

“we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Image: ‘lonely tree in the snow’