We live the next street over from school so for the last year I have been walking the kids to and from school (much to their dismay). I am choosing to believe that the dismay is due to the walking rather than their walking companion but I can practically hear the clock ticking away the seconds until we hit teenage strops so I fear my days of arm in arm walking are numbered.
It's not a long walk. If we're cutting it fine we can make it in 7 and a half minutes but even at a leisurely pace it barely takes 10. Twice a day, 5 days a week, I walk to and from school. When the kids are with me there are questions and stories and sometimes a bit of grumbling. When I'm on my own there is thinking and planning and sometimes a bit of grumbling.
Walking the same route where not much changes from day to day gives me the freedom to switch to auto-pilot. The equivalent of those days when you drive home from work and don't even remember the journey. I have tried to use my walk to engage in some active mindfulness but the nagging ever present mental load at the back of my mind always seems to butt in and take over.
Maybe this is why women need more sleep than men. We are tired from always having to remember. Remember what? Everything. The stuff that needs to be added to the shopping list, the optician's appointment that needs to be booked, the birthday card that needs to be written. The French graphic artist Emma wrote a piece which sums up the mental load up really well.
I have given up trying to be present and zen while I am walking and have allocated this as my getting organised time. I figure if I can think about this time more positively then I might just be able to claim back some time later in the day for getting my mental house in order.
Thinking I can do on the move, mindfulness I need to be sitting still for.
The other day I was looking for an address in town so this being 2019 I googled it. "You visited here on 6 May" popped up on my screen. "Eh, what?". I had never been to the place before, hence my needing to google where it was. After clicking on the message I discovered there is this thing called Location History in Google where if you have it switched on (and apparently I did), it tracks all the places you have been. If I clicked on a certain date, Google could show me where I had been at any given time on that date.
This could be seen as a bit stalkery if I hadn't inadvertently already agreed to it. It might come in handy some day I suppose. You know those police dramas where they ask "where were you at 1.17 pm on June 24th?", well at least now I would be able to provide myself with an alibi.
Even on the rare occasions when I click on the Terms & Conditions section with the intention of reading through it, there are so many conditions and clauses and subsections that I never end up finishing them and just click accept regardless. Which is ultimately what they hope you will do.
If we ever stopped and really thought about the access we give to apps and companies, we would probably never touch another piece of technology again. Instead we blithely choose to disregard this aspect of our interaction with our devices. It is "the price we pay" to stay connected.
On a recent trip to Christchurch I spent the first day walking round the city centre. As I didn't know where I was going, the map looks like a spider dipped her bum in some ink, had a couple of vodka shots and then wove a crazy web.
#everystepyoutake
#enoughwiththetsandcs
#allovertheplace
There is a bus stop 100m from my front door but I have never used it to catch a bus. In the 6 and a half years I have been living in New Zealand, I caught the bus for the first time last month and it wasn't even my local bus, it was in Christchurch. I had no access to a car and the bus was the easiest way to get into town so on I hopped.
What struck me first was the silence. Here I was on a bus travelling with maybe 20 other people and it was eerily quiet. No-one was speaking, there was no interaction, most people had their heads down looking at phones. Having spent my youth on buses going to secondary school and then to college, the quiet made me sad. My memory of past bus journeys feels like there was always the background noise of people talking. The students debating where the cheapest pints could be found, the aul' ones discussing who had died, friends dissecting the night before and who said what to whom. "She didn't! She did!!!". A wealth of entertainment for the casual eavesdropper.
Now don't get me wrong, there were journeys where talking was the last thing on my mind. I vividly remember a Russian Roulette trip home after the night before's double tequila shots threatened to make a reappearance. Interesting side note, double shots do not go down all in one go and tequila is evil. I'm sure as a student there were also many times I put my headphones on and passed the journey home in anti-social silence.
If I was travelling by bus every day, chances are I would switch off from the outside world too. It's probably just rose tinted nostalgia that has me fondly remembering the bus journeys of 25 years ago. On my last day in Christchurch, I caught the bus back to the hotel. I had been walking round all day, I was tired and hungry and not entirely sure which stop was mine. Two teenage schoolgirls got on and proceeded to chat the entire journey about school, which teachers they liked, what they were going to do at the weekend and just like that, I was back on the bus to Kill with my faith in the bus going citizens of the world restored.
It feels like I should make an announcement in the style of the start of a support group meeting. "My name is Denise and I have only just joined Instagram".
With the Blog and Facebook, I figured I had enough social media going on, so had thus far managed to avoid the lure of Instagram. I'm trying to reduce the amount of time I spend on a screen not increase it. All good, valid reasons to not venture any further into the myriad of social media options available.
Alright, I will admit that laziness also played a factor. I just couldn't be faffed with having to take loads of pictures and put filters on them and then think up witty hashtags whilst simultaneously fighting the urge to punctuate them properly. It all seemed a bit like hard work when most of the time I spend my days doing things that are not even remotely Instagrammable. Here's a photo of me doing the laundry. Here I am trying to figure out what to have for dinner. Not exactly influencer gold is it?
The reason I joined Instagram was because I had the fear. Not the fear of missing out. It was the fear of being an utterly clueless parent to two teenagers that did it. I watched two programmes recently that scared the bejesus out of me. The first one was called Spying on my Family. It was about a family who gave each other open access to all their phones, devices and social media accounts. The Dad of the family was appalled when he saw what his 14 and 11 year old sons were following on Instagram. Scantily clad women featured heavily. There were admissions that nudes had been asked for and received. This guy wasn't your average clueless parent either, he was an ex-cop. If he had no idea what his kids were doing online what the hell hope did I have.
The next programme I watched was called The Hunting. It was an Australian drama about the ramifications of a nude teen photo scandal. For me, this was the more terrifying of the two. The sending and receiving of naked pictures was just accepted as being commonplace, an everyday occurrence, no big deal. Seriously? WTF? Luckily I had recorded both programmes as I had to keep pausing them so I could vent and shout at the screen. "Don't do it" I yelled at the teenage girl sending a naked photo to the boy she liked, "the internet is forever". The cavalier sharing of the photo, then the cold calculation of distributing it to her peers and beyond. The horror of it all.
There are some days when I bemoan getting older but I am truly grateful that I was a teenager well before social media was around. It is hard enough for teenagers dealing with zig-zagging emotions, hormones and a body that seems to be working against them. Now they are expected to be able to think about the potential future ramifications of their actions every time they take a picture or post something online. When your brain is still developing and all your friends are doing it, how the hell are you supposed to say no?
My kids are 11 and 9 so I only have a year or two to get up to speed. To try to be able to adequately parent them through the shit storm of their teenage years and get them out the other side without having a digital footprint that will haunt them forever. So I am starting with Instagram and even though the app they will end up using has probably not even been created yet, when it is, I will gamely join that too. Because I don't want to be that parent who has no idea what their kid is up to. I don't want to have to pick up the pieces when social media eats them alive. I'm going to learn as much as I can so that when the time comes, I can teach them to walk the tightrope between being involved online and being safe. Wish me luck.
