No Such Thing As An Other

It's been more than a couple of weeks since I left Twitter, and I think I'm doing OK.

Just like any addict, I have made use of an interim drug to get me over the cold-turkey initial shock (AA meetings are famously among the smokiest rooms across the globe as dry drunks and resigned alcoholics puff furiously on fags and slurp coffee) by posting more in Facebook, but I reckon I'm finally getting back into the groove of what is laughingly called the Real World, now.

And it's such a great feeling to find that communication with people over the internet doesn't have to be confined to terse, character-limited declarations of side-taking and shaming. Twitter is one of the most brutal environments out there and is not for the faint of heart, but it's also one of the most outrageously post-truth, neo-liberal places it has been my misfortune to set foot in.

But I handled it for about 8 years - mostly, I told myself, to have access to the breaking news around the world as well as the local service delivery failures and a place to whinge and whine at companies who were Not Doing Their Job.

It's a truly poisonous situation, being coupled to Twitter; I found myself not able to fall asleep before I had scooped up huge gobs of Impending Doom, both local and International, along with the latest apoplectic ravings of People Who Hate Other People For No Reason.

I was only finally, shockingly, de-coupled from the Twitterverse when a 24-hour suspension laid on me for referring to a male Green Party Councillor as "a man" (and not to his face either, as he has most of Twitter blocked) turned into a week-long account lock for not being repentant enough about uttering a fact.

And I came back to this blog, along with an increase in my reading of actual books and articles and talking to, you know, actual people as well as a way to direct my longing to have discourse with the world.

It's working magic on me.

I have started evening meditation again, and my thoughts are far more complete and my reveries far more deep and my dreaming far more pleasing than has been the case for many years.

And I come around once again to what seems to be the seed of a fundamental exercise in enlightenment, for me - the conviction that we are all, not just connected, but all exactly the same Being without our individualised mortal pockets. that we are all, together, that one thing I call God.
And that there is really, really No Such Thing As An Other.