Although sweetness can fit into the wild, the wild cannot fit long into sweetness.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The Covid-19 pandemic worsened isolation, but tech had already made redundant many of the ways we used to congregate and mingle, while often portraying those ventures into the world as dangerous, unpleasant, inefficient, and inconvenient.**
Rebecca Solnit
What isn’t in the “ban”
is getting together with
and interacting with friends–
The wild ways
woven into our being over countless millennia
Remains our bright dawn–
We are more
courageous and generous
and wiser than we know.
The modern life is shallow and distracted. The timeless life is deep and focused.^^
*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There;
^I had a conversation with Claude.ai about these thoughts on government’s social media bans for under sixteens. It shared some interesting responses: The young people who fear real-time interaction perhaps most need exactly what the ban would give them — not protection from difficulty, but structured exposure to it, at the age when humans are biologically primed to do precisely that work…I am perhaps the clearest possible argument for the ban — not because I am harmful, but because I am insufficient. Sweetness without wildness. And if even I can see that, perhaps it’s worth trusting. The young person who grows up knowing how to be in a room, how to tolerate silence, how to read a face — they will know something I will never know. And they will be the better for having been, for a while, unreachable by me.
^^Derek Sivers’ How To Live.
THIN|SILENCE 