The Overwhelm is Deafening

     Like so many I can lose hours clicking about to happy faces and updates of friends across the miles and across time per the magic of Facebook. It's a little mini high to be able to reach out to someone you haven't seen since you were 10 to catch a glimpse of where life finds them today and to offer a friendly hello.
     And while pictures are worth a thousand words, there are things that pictures can't convey, (or won't for having never been posted) that speak to other parts of life--very real parts of life, that by default are less than welcome by way of acknowledgment. For who posts a picture of their internal battles, of fears gone unspoken, of dreams unfulfilled? I suspect it's one reason we respond as we do to the passing of a pet...I contend it triggers in us a momentary empathy pass... like some universal pressure value it allows all one brief moment of collective sadness, before we resume our picture perfect patterns of posts.
     But by limiting our sadnesses, are we throwing our psyches out of whack? In those quieter moments...in our silent times, are we as happy as our postings might indicate?
     I once had a business partner who called them "2 am WOWS" --those mid-delta-sleep moments when panic shoots through you like a bolt of lightening, abruptly waking you with thoughts of "Did you remember to..?" or "How are you EVER gonna ...?" Those annoying, judgmental, all-too-familiar thoughts that leave us exhausted on top of the exhaustion that brought us to bed in the first place....Those thoughts we race to replace with something--anything-- that allows to to return to a more peaceful state of mind.
     As much as I adore the musings...the pictures, the posts....it's those I encounter on FB at 2 am whose timing (not pictures) speak a greater truth, for I suspect they are doing exactly what I'm doing, which is to say working to distract my mind from the worries it habitually defaults to.
     For while the party went great, and the family photos are perfect...Where's the rest of us? And are we inadvertently mind altering to a point of dysfunction when it comes to the reality that pain and sadnesses exist, they just aren't the preferred guests of choice, so let's deny they ever happen and get back to happier times.
     In my effort to dig a layer deeper to find just how I arrived at my own states of overwhelm (that seem to come up more often at holiday time), it occurs to me that Rome wasn't built in a day, nor did my stress arrive out of nowhere. Instead, I suspect a series of backed up, snuffed out, smoothed over issues lay in wait, ever poised to erupt like some Hawaiian volcano with one shifting seismic plate. Perhaps the surface was meant to be broken all along, so as to allow out the steam of all those feelings not acceptable for proper social settings...Energies that, despite your best efforts, WILL eventually surface, and when they do, what 'cha gonna post then?
     My wish...my hope...my dream is that we one day acknowledge our sadder times, our fearful times, our human times with the same greeting and embrace we address our happier ones. For I personally think it's affecting our balance as a planet eager to share a moment, but only the ones we feel you want to see or will approve of, and not the ones we're feeling when you aren't invited to look.