Weekend Journaling Prompt

On comfort

November’s live Book Club postponed • My interview with Andy J Pizza on Creative Pep Talk • Writing about the art of wintering for The Independent • Did you know I have a short course on Insight Timer? • Upgrade to an annual subscription for a chance to win my writing essentials

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This week, I unsubscribed to a handful of political podcasts. I’ve been listening to them avidly for a few years now, tracking the electoral cycles that have pressed so heavily on my mind. But now, suddenly, I’m done. They feel like a waste of time, and not just because they turned out to be so bad at predicting real-life outcomes. They represent a way in which my brain has been wrapped up in useless, obsessive detail that has kept me worrying rather than acting. It’s time to step away. 

I would once have scorned myself for this, but no longer. We were not made to process news on this scale, over such long periods of time. Today, I must have opened each of my five news apps several times, trying to drink in news as if it would ever slake my anxieties. I do not need to tell you that it doesn’t work, and that it makes absolutely no difference to the issues at hand. I could cut my news consumption down by 90 per cent, and still count as well-informed by traditional standards. The rest is just behaviour. I’m attempting to address my own helplessness through excess.

I’ve noticed a lot of people migrating to Bluesky this week. I will not be doing that. When I left Twitter a couple of years ago, I realised that it had become a voice in my head - a conglomerate of all the people I followed on there, personified - that told me that I must always, always be paying attention, that my concern was never enough. I loved all those people individually, but together they were monstrous - an angry, reactive beast that felt forever under threat. It was like being trapped at a particularly gruelling party where fights kept breaking out, and you felt you had to wade into them for the sake of loyalty. In the end, I found the fire exit. Life got better. I will not be going back there again. 

I’m saying this not to judge the people who are heading delightedly into a new space, but to say, simply, that I needed my own peace of mind. As I write that, I can hear the massed voice of social media roaring that I am not allowed that, if I am to be a good person; that I am selfish, privileged, a stooge. That voice, apparently, is pretty hard to exorcise. That doesn’t mean it’s right. 

I agree with the Twitter Monster that we all have a responsibility to do what we can in this world, but I no longer agree that there’s one right way to go about it. Since I left, I’ve let go of the idea that I can effect positive change by composing witty ripostes to people who aren’t listening anyway, and instead I’ve asked myself what I can do in practice to help. Those things do not have to be visible to the outside world to be valid. I don’t have to perform my goodness to an audience. I can trust myself to judge.

And in the meantime, I write posts and books that suggest we go outside and look at the moon, that we pick up stones for long enough to feel them grow warm. I know that seems pointless to a lot of people, but to me, it’s a vital part of the picture. If we want to be good - if we want to resist the uprising of selfishness and hate - then we must learn to still ourselves. We must make space in which we can listen, contemplate, and sometimes reconsider. We must come into contact with the world around us. We must foster wisdom.

Activism, in whatever form it takes, is only useful if we can sustain it. If we fail to absorb that fact, then we are simply mirroring the attitudes of the corporate world, which tells us that we are only valuable if we are working. If we are to build a new world, a better one, then it must not replicate these values. Instead, we should create pools of peace to live in, in the hope that they will spread. These allow us to go out into a menacing world, knowing we can come back and be renewed

From next week, I’ll be starting a new series of posts aimed at building the soft skills we need for these hard times. But for today, I’m offering a journaling prompt on something restorative that we all need: comfort.