almost a month now

and today it dawned on me:

my current recovery
is not
JUST
from addiction
but is
HUMAN
recovery

rediscovering what it means

to be

human again

how to exist

and

function in the world

exploring the practices

and behaviors

that truly

fufill me

this thought

suddenly occured to me

as i laid down

in the

..#*\,,`g.,r..a,.s`.,s..*/#..

(something i'd not done

in far, far too long)

and stared up

at the sky

watching the clouds

s l o w l y

roll by

before doing this

a small part of myself

lamented my phone being dead

and told myself

i'd be bored for

the next hour

but then

i noticed

the lush

green

grass

looked quite inviting

and was struck

by an urge to lay down

letting my mind

w~a~n~d~e~r

with this clouds

then

the cheap notebook i brought

called out

and i thought to myself

'this is what it means
to be human again'

for the past fifteen (!) years

since i have owned

a smartphone

(and really before that

with my first laptop)

i've been enthralled

with the

intoxicating ability

to access any content

instantly

i've never had any

qualms with piracy

so i was inundated with a

veritable torrent

(pun, most definitely intended)

of whatever i wanted

whenever i wanted

but

what seemed like

an incredible boon

in time, instead,

became a bane

with all this

unfettered access

i became

addicted

to downloading

EVERYTHING

i'd stay up for hours

searching for

obscure torrents

and anticipating

their completion

only to barely

glance at the content

and move on to the next

there would be SO many

books, movies/shows, games, music

that my ocd would kick in

and i would spend

HOURS

culling and curating

all this content

only to have it largely untouched

in a word it was

M   A   D   N   E   S  S

it dawned on me

several times

but inevitably

my solution would always be

to cull

to curate

which would lead to enormous amounts

of analysis paralysis

too many things i 'needed'

that i couldn't let go of

just in case

basically

i became a digital hoarder

the height of this furvor

was about 5 years ago

since then

i have largely scaled my

consumption

waaay back

however

even until now

some of the same habits

persist to

a lesser degree

i limit my aquisition of content

but still have periods

where i have to cull and curate

or sometimes purge completely

i'm better at utilizing

the content i do have

but there still is

a higher

signal to noise ratio

than i am comfortable with

however

the last few months

and especially the last month

has been a huge sea change

by necessity

my

engagement with the ephemeral

intangible

difital

has decreased

dramatically

while my engagement

wtih the physical

tangible

material

has increased

in equal proportion

bringing about my current understanding

and

renewed sense of what it means

to be human

to be an individual interacting with the world

more intimately

more authentically

sobriety has been integral

to rediscovering the world

and my place in it

but the REAL recovery

is

becoming re-intergrated back into the world

on a fundamental

direct relationship

and that

is

true recovery

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