“touch grass, touch iron, touch paper and every other thing the Earth has to offer…”
In recent times I’ve been a victim of a term called “doom scrolling”. It’s when you unconsciously scroll through your phone for hours on end. This is usually associated with procrastination and lethargy. You’d rather sit down and while away time, then tell yourself you’re bored and there’s nothing to do when in truth, there’s a ton of things to do.
This might sound familiar as, though we live very distinct lives as individuals, there is still a lot of similarities in our day-to-day living.
Finding someone who is immensely in touch with reality these days is a rarity. We live in a world of escapism where our best solution to our problems is build up personal systems and mechanisms that allows us “forget” about these problems, but the truth is those problems are still there, we just keep finding new and newer ways to temporarily keep them out of our minds.
We forget about the principle of containing and not controlling. Rather than containing our reactions towards challenges, embodying these emotions and using it to shape and mold ourselves for a better life, we take matters into our own hands in a bid to control the emotions we feel as though we are a television and we have the ability to switch emotions like we’re switching through channels. The truth of the matter is this is not reality.
Touch Grass.
I want to be in touch with nature but the funny thing is I don’t even know what that means. Do I go to some random forest, sing a melody and have the animals in there surround me, while we dance and sing together, like one of those Cinderella movies? Probably not.
I think being in touch with nature is understanding the concept of time and seasons and understanding the concept of habits and continuity. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. The deeper the roots of a plant can burrow, the taller its branches can grow and that burrowing takes time and continuous effort. So being in touch with nature is understanding that everything works based on time and seasons, and growth is only a product of habits and continuous efforts.
Touch Iron.
I’ve spent enough time around the self-improvement atmosphere and this is one of the most talked about steps. They tell you in order to get your life together, you need to get in the right shape. There is some level of truth to this but not entirely. You see it’s usually always painted in a way that you need to be the best person at the gym. Now, it is true that whatever is worth doing is worth doing well, but you don’t necessarily need to be the strongest, toughest and most fit person there is. I touch iron as a way of understanding the truth about strength, discipline and resilience. They come through pain and discomfort. They feed off of suffering and hardship. And the best way to voluntarily put yourself in a situation of discomfort that is relatively safe (as long as you don’t take it too far) is to touch iron.
Touch Paper.
My mind is a colosseum of thoughts and I find it very hard to focus. One minute, I have the most life-changing idea that could set me up for good, and then another minute, I just lose it. I totally forget what it is I was thinking about.
I think this comes from a shortened attention span that has been treated by YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels to fix your mind on something for 1 minute and then scroll to the next. This trains your mind to act like a sieve when life is like water. You’d lack the ability to hold anything in place. So I took a pen and a paper and started to write down things. Random things, random thoughts. Both things that seemed relevant and things that did not. I write and write and write, an exercise that takes careful thinking and practice, as a way of resetting the damage I have allowed social media to cause to my brain. For it is in these thoughts, life can sometimes proceed.
…And Every Other Thing Life Has To Offer.
This includes people, experiences, stories, challenges, relationships, lessons, wins and losses. Embracing everything life throws at you, not as a sponge ready absorb life hostility but as a mirror ready to reflect the good in every bad situation.
These four things are my attack plan for solving this addiction that plagues my life. An addiction that has stolen my focus and drive for life and driven me to the point of feeling extinct and lifeless, not understanding my place in a world that has been painted to be perfect.
I want to touch grass, touch iron, touch paper and everything other thing life has to offer.
