I've opened a new anonymous facebook
account from which to run my facebook author page. It means I can still enjoy
the safe supportive atmosphere of my page but can avoid being bombarded by news and opinions on my personal page.
My motivation is a desire for freedom.
Freedom from all those emotional reactions that inevitably arise whenever I scroll through my
feed.
For instance, it's been hard to avoid
reading bitter comments about Catalonia. But what's the point of poking the
wound by reading about it all the time?
"It will all come to pass," my
(Catalan and Spanish) father says, sounding more like the Bible than a
whatsapp text message.
Two weeks on and I'm doing well in my
quieter, happier world. I'm calm. I'm accepting the world as it it. But then a
friend takes me for an ice cream and it begins... the first stirring of emotion
as she decides to try different flavours and for each flavour the woman serving
has to give her a new little plastic spoon.
It is as it is, I think, as the spoons mount on the counter. At least I can avoid more unnecessary plastic use
by being decisive about my choice. I ask for an almond cone.
The woman serves up it up and before I can say anything, she reaches for a spoon and plunges it
into my ice cream.
"I don't need it!" I say, but of
course it's too late. She takes the spoon out to throw it away. One second of use and
that spoon will now last on the planet a few hundred years. "Oh you're
going to throw it away now?" I say helplessly. "I was trying not to
use so much plastic."
My friend has finally decided on her
flavour.
"You don't need to give her a
spoon," I say, "she already has three!"
The woman smiles and says she won't. She
probably thinks I'm a bore. But after she dishes up the ice cream she reaches
for the spoon because it's so automatic. She stops herself just in time but it
fills me with gloom thinking how many she must pointlessly dole out each
day.
"If only other people were as
environmentally conscious as you," the woman says brightly.
It strikes me as such a stupid thing to
say. She's not giving people a chance! She's the one automatically
reaching for spoons even though people have been successfully eating ice cream
from a cone without the need for plastic for over a hundred years!
Later, as I sit on the beach, trying to
listen to my friend, my mind keeps wandering to that spoon. Though there are far worse things happening in the world, many that I would have read about
during the day had I been on facebook, it was that little pointless plastic
spoon that made me lose my inner calm.
Perhaps because it was so simple to solve
and yet wouldn't be solved. Perhaps because it was a crime against nature and nature doesn't have a religious or political agenda. It's easier to be on the
side of nature than all these megalomaniacs running the world...
Clearly it's impossible to shut ourselves off
from everything that upsets us. But we do have a choice in how we deal
with it. I'm not going to let that spoon ruin the rest of my week - but I would be pleased if anyone reading this made a point of shouting out 'no thank you' to the ice cream server lunging to give you a pointless spoon!!
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Related post: 6 Beauty Spots in Mallorca and 1 Ugly Problem
