Total Media Fast: Day 5....Not so cold turkey
It is Thanksgiving Day. I am spending more time with my wife and my two girls than I have in a while. Without the media distractions, it is different.
Things come up that were otherwise hidden by the focus on the external cultural environment. Arguments erupt over the tone of the conversation and how we are casting the other person.
Aggravated both by weeks of being busy parents and the fact that our kids are telling us to shut-up (5 yo and 8 yo).
We send them downstairs to watch a movie while we work it out. And hear each other, instead of the regurgitated echoes of the disempowering narratives in social media. The narratives that tell us to interpret one another's words as demeaning, as violent, as abusive, as careless...as contributing to the oppression by the "privileged" upon those that are not.
And we work it out. We both speak and experience love for one another. We hear and understand the source of frustration hidden by the derisive discourse of the polarized narrative. We take stock and experience the value of one another's unique contribution to our family and the presence of others in our lives.
This is what it means to be empowered. To speak and act with accountability for the suffering in our own lives. To see beneath the flash or slow burn of anger through the layers of fear, sorrow, and loss to the exquisite rawness of our naken human experience. And to rest here--making space for others to become empowered in their own way.
Things come up that were otherwise hidden by the focus on the external cultural environment. Arguments erupt over the tone of the conversation and how we are casting the other person.
Aggravated both by weeks of being busy parents and the fact that our kids are telling us to shut-up (5 yo and 8 yo).
We send them downstairs to watch a movie while we work it out. And hear each other, instead of the regurgitated echoes of the disempowering narratives in social media. The narratives that tell us to interpret one another's words as demeaning, as violent, as abusive, as careless...as contributing to the oppression by the "privileged" upon those that are not.
And we work it out. We both speak and experience love for one another. We hear and understand the source of frustration hidden by the derisive discourse of the polarized narrative. We take stock and experience the value of one another's unique contribution to our family and the presence of others in our lives.
This is what it means to be empowered. To speak and act with accountability for the suffering in our own lives. To see beneath the flash or slow burn of anger through the layers of fear, sorrow, and loss to the exquisite rawness of our naken human experience. And to rest here--making space for others to become empowered in their own way.
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