Stop! Don’t tell me any more. Don’t want to hear it.
Keep the news to yourself. It hurts me, it’s always bad.
No news is good news. I want no news thrown at me. I want you to stop telling me about elections, the dow jones, health care reform.
I can’t do anything about it. I have no control of it. But it can control me. It can force me to focus on its stuff, think about the harm, the hurt the news shoves at me and all other sensitive living beings.
Why do you think I stopped reading newspapers? I don’t watch television news either. It hurts to hear of current events, world events, el sicko events. I got dose after dose of the War in Iraq and wanted to charge up the hill of the capital and throw out all the bastards that got us into such a mess. Wanted to hurt them for hurting us for no good reason.
My PTSD erupted. The post traumatic stress became “today’s” traumatic stress. Didn’t need to look far for any “triggering” events to set me off. They were all around me. In the movies and on television. In the music and songs of our modern troubadours. Out story-tellers, Our eye-witness newscasters.
Give me the blinders. Block away this so-called reality. I want little or nothing to do with your “news.”
You can’t find peace in anything you see, hear or read. It can only come from within. Sans outside voices, video displays and scrawling ticker tapes of gloom and doom.
Allow me this peace. Simply go away. Let me be to let it all go.
Now.
________________________
Thank you for this space, this understanding. It’s not you I’m mad at. It’s the rest of the world that I don’t want to hear from, that I must hide away, stay clear of too much exposure to. It will take me down, force me to wallow in their mix of hand-picked journalistic “facts,” their virtual realities, their numbing “need to know” garbage that can lead to nothing but more and more depression.
I want the sun to shine without any commentary, the rain to fall without a forecaster, love to grow without a critical review. I want to leave your imposed view and create my own pure and innocent “illusion.” Give me enlightenment without the touch of human fingerprints.
Please stay away from my path. Don’t detour me on this Journey I’ve chosen. Keep the news to your self. I have no need to know anymore.
Contoveros 
I find that I need to be careful about what I see and hear and become aware of. I don’t want to hibernate and hide out from the world, but I need to be careful not to let the world overwhelm me. I remind myself of the bigger picture…the real purpose for life and being. I look to the One who made it all. That brings me comfort and peace in the midst of the craziness. Without Him…I would not be here. I just would not be able to do life.
LikeLike
Onesurvivor,
Without Him, there’d be no Life.
No news, either. But I could live with less of that anyway!
Belated thanks.
michael j
LikeLike
I have no tv, computer or cell phone, although I do check my email occasionally. One of my favorite sayings is,”If you cannot improve the silence, please refrain from speaking!”
Lea S
LikeLike
What a lovely saying, Lea!
And so are you!
I’m just “saying.”
“Lovely.”
“You.”
michael j
LikeLike
*small nod*
I have no cable TV at my house (and borrowed or purchased content is carefully chosen and commercial free) – I do not read papers, I do not watch the news…I do NOT watch any form of ‘talk show’ (such as Dr. Phil – Jerry Springer and the like)
This was a very deliberate decision on my part that was meant to narrow my focus to only things that I can influence in my short time on this earth.
Yes there is pain in the world – yes, there is extreme suffering…
But I can change that instead of wallowing in it – by NOT looking to it as ‘entertainment’ rather than sharing in it as part of my earth bound human experience.
Every day of my life I am breathing in a particle of some other person’s life, from some other time/place/destiny and it becomes a part of whom and what I will become (or choose to become)
A kind word and an encouraging smile can carry me to the other side of the world in time – that is just the way things work and if anyone ever wanted to start making changes in their life they should know it is that easy to start moving in the right direction…
One grain of hope may seem like one grain of sand in an endless ocean of need but – give hope to one person, lend them your own for a while – watch them share it with someone else and allow that to accumulate and you have a shoreline forming soon enough, a place to rest and let the sun warm you (if only for a little while)
You don’t see that in the ‘news’ often – if it didn’t happen everyday, THEN it would become ‘news’.
M.L.
LikeLike
So beautiful and so very, very wise! Thanks for sharing. If more people lived this way, it would change the world.
My path is pretty much the same; I was little TV, except for science and nature shows on the Discovery Channel and Science Channel. My path, however, does include a dharma warrior aspect (which is NOT to say yours doesn’t!) where I consciously and very mindfully do take on a lot of the news, as part of my metta practice, for the world. This has led me to very direct action for Haiti, for example, not only my own financial support for doctors in the area, but specific metta for people and events there. This isn’t to say that this path is for everyone, and what you see and read can indeed overwhelm, and one has to take refuge. Still, this is my path, and it’s working, but it’s only possible in the context of metta practice. Just wanted to add this to the perspective.
LikeLike
ML and Steven,
I get some of my news from you guys, here on the Internet, and I feel I can trust it more. I used a little poetic license to show my emotions at the extreme level, but I was trying to make the point how life can be lived very well without a daily dose of that kind of reality.
Thank you.
Now let me calm down and get back to watching “24.”
michael j
LikeLike
>>Now let me calm down and get back to watching “24.”
LOL!!
Michael J, I totally understood where you were coming from, and the point you made is a great one….the news/entertainment complex is marketing an audio/visual drug, with the profit the sole motive….we can’t be too careful too careful, as ML’s beautiful comment also made so clear..
LikeLike
Take refuge, my friend! Take refuge in the breath. Take refuge in simple presence. Take refuge in nature’s beauty. Just this.
Who of us hasn’t felt, as Wordsworth says, that “The world is too much with us; late and soon…?”
The gospels say that even Jesus had to get away from the demanding crowds and find long hours of refuge in prayer in the hills above Galilee. How about us?
Take refuge, dear Michael, and deep peace and quiet to your dear, dear heart.
Steve
LikeLike
Thank you Steven. Have put it all behind me, but wanted to let it out to see what if felt like on paper.
Not a pretty site. But, now I can focus more on the kinder things in life.
LikeLike
Dear Michael,
I too have, for the most part, “removed myself” from most (not all) of the day’s news, and have for the most part decided to leave politics to others (although there are certain elections I would definitely vote in!). But it’s not even so much the news that upsets me as the comments I read from other people–comments that betray so much anger and knee-jerk hostility and intolerance (read the comments on even the most benign of CNN’s news stories to see what I mean).
It’s funny (here comes that synchronicity thing again!)–I was thinking about how upsetting it all is to me this morning as I got ready to go to my meeting. Then I got to thinking that it’s NOT ABOUT ME, or my comfort level. I have every comfort, everything I need and more. I don’t need to immerse myself in politics or the news, but the least I can do (and I know you do it) is to not simply “hide” from it so that I can be less upset, but to try in any small ways I can to help others see that there are other ways to think of the world and each other than just hostility and mistrust. I’ve finally come to see that–although I guess it’s not always the case–sometimes people are just so unhappy and so lost in the day-to-day struggles that it never occurs to them that there are other ways.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’ve “got it all down” myself, either. But it’s gotten easier to see.
Nancy
http://saradode.wordpress.com
LikeLike
” . . . [T]o try in any small ways I can to help others see that there are other ways to think of the world and each other than just hostility and mistrust . . .”
That’s it in a nutshell, Nancy. Shine the light, the focus eleswhere to do good, not bad.
michael j
LikeLike
[…] Stop the presses, stop depression, stop. « Contoveros […]
LikeLike
This is a site that was “self-generated” for anyone with depression or an overdose of the daily news. Has some pretty good sections. Check it out!
michael j
LikeLike