“Stop” is a word I like very much.
Every day we are buried in a deluge of new information, new content, new this, new that. We are collecting and watching and reading and listening but not processing. So all of these information and content become just noise. Meaningless noise. Once in awhile, something jumps out at us, and we feel the desire to dive deeper or to process it, but we’re instantly hijacked again by new information, new content.
The cycle is deep and endless and tragic.
So it’s good to stop. Not just taking in less, but taking in none. Even one day of stopping works wonders for the soul. Three days are better. A week even better.
When we stop consuming so much new information and new content, we have time to look through our backlog of things we really want to look at. Books that are collecting dust on our bookshelf, an essay that we want to read again, an album that deserves our full listening attention, and so on. We stop consuming new stuff so we can have the capacity to digest the old stuff.
And it is the digesting and processing that is meaningful. We get to synthesise the new knowledge with what we already know, and we also get to properly learn new things without being swept away by the next Youtube video, the next great article, the next inspiring Instagram post.
Wishing you a Happy Lunar New Year and may this year be full of the best kind of stopping.