On Consuming the News as a Contemplative

10/20/20

Dear friend,

One of the questions that continually presents itself to me is how to tend with faithfulness my contemplative stance, which so often needs silence, stillness, and discernment, alongside staying informed about our world, its development, and its needs.

Perhaps this question presents itself with regularity to you too.

Here's how I think about it: We live in a particular time and place. The contemplative light within us engages the actual world we live in. Our light is meant for the needs of the here and now.

So, how do we tend to both?

I'm curious if you've found a way that works for you. In this letter, I'm sharing what's currently working for me, along with a few insights that members of the Light House community shared in a recent thread where we shared ideas around this.

First up, what's working for me.

One shift I made in recent months was to assign my news reading to a certain time of day.

I subscribe to 4-5 daily news missives that drop into my inbox at various times of the day. Rather than pause what I'm doing to read them when they arrive or (as was more often the case) letting them pile up for days and days unread, I assigned them a particular time of my day.

My time for reading the news is between 8–9AM with my morning coffee on the couch. If I don't get to it on a particular morning, I start again the next day, and I give myself permission to archive the missives I don't read on a given day, based on the idea that "Always we can start again."

This past weekend, I added another layer to this, which was to create a new email account for the news.

Now, this might sound "next level" and a bit over the top, but I'll tell you why I did it and how it's proving additionally helpful to me.

A few months ago, I took Elise Joy's Inbox Bootcamp course. She says it's for people who want some tough love and encouragement when it comes to their inbox management, and that was definitely me. I had multiple inboxes and a poor approach to managing all of them. I was drowning in email.

The course was quick to complete, inexpensive, transformative, and terrific.

However, two of the tenets she teaches in the course is to take email off your phone and to only look at emails one time (ie., process them immediately, which is helped by setting particular times of the day for doing email).

I ran into two challenges with this:

• I like reading news missives and newsletter subscriptions on my phone with my morning coffee, not on my laptop.
  
  

• I don't like reading the news or newsletters at the same time I'm processing emails that need a response or particular action from me.

My solution this past weekend, after struggling with this for a couple months, was to take my active email addresses off my phone but to create news and newsletter email addresses to put on my phone for the particular time of day when I do those activities.

It might sound complicated (and I won't blame you if you're laughing or shaking your head at me right now!), but I'm finding this helps me with my ongoing commitment to move at the speed of soul. Certain things get put in a certain place, and I tend to them when it's their turn.

A couple additional ideas, compliments of some wise women in the Light House community:

• "Praying the news" as a way to intercede and lament (see this Spirituality & Practice article for further inspiration)
  
  

• Subscribing to international papers for varied perspectives
  
  

• "Look without, look within," meaning to notice what grabs your heart and sit with it, rather than feeling responsible to bear witness to all the news all the time
  
  

• Approaching the news with a "lowered gaze," one that allows a bit of fuzziness between one's self and world events so as to stay aware without being overwhelmed
  
  

• Focusing on the "hyper local level." As this individual shared, "It’s easier to actually impact the decisions of my local city council than those at the national level, and those local issues are often the ones that are easiest to actually talk to our neighbours about. . . . It’s let me feel less helpless and more hopeful that good people around me care about the place we live and about the whole planet."

Such wisdom, yes?

Again, I'd be so happy to hear what has been working for you with this. How do you keep up with the news while honoring your contemplative posture?

Yours at the speed of soul,
Christianne