Objects in photo are smaller than they appear

*It's been over a year since I broke up with my cell phone

Dear Kula Diaries,

I am deeply grateful to live in a beautiful location that affords me the opportunity to walk up and down a small mountain every single day. Our house sits at 479ft elevation, and the ‘summit’ of the small mountain behind our house is around 1,000ft. Each morning, I don my headlamp and mini backpack (equipped with bear spray), and I head out for a walk in the dark.

As I approach the top of the mountain, the views of the surrounding area become wide and vast — I can see Tahoma (Mt. Rainier) looming in the distance… and the Olympic Mountain Range to the West. If I look closely enough, I can see a tiny cluster of small buildings — the skyline of Seattle.

This morning as I walked up and down the hill, I watched as the darkness faded into a creamy orange color — a tiny crescent of the moon, perfectly hovering in the distance.

Since I’ve been painting again, I often take photos of the sunrises that I get to witness, and I use them as reference photos for my paintings. As I stand, perched on a little rocky ledge, I take a photo of Tahoma and every single time, I’m struck by the same thing over and over: how can something so massive… look so tiny and unimpressive in a photo?

Through the lens of my eyes, Tahoma looks like a behemoth in the distance — an impossibly large mountain that towers above everything. The first time that I climbed Mt. Rainier, I remember being completely blown away by the scale of the mountain. When I had climbed in the Olympics or the Cascades, I always had the sense of being ‘surrounded’ by a sea of peaks… but, Tahoma was different. From the summit of Tahoma, looking down… the mountains and hills that had seemed impossibly tall on our approach, looked like a flat carpet of terrain — barely hills compared to the consequential prominence of a 14,411’ volcano that rises up from sea level to touch the sky.

Tahoma — the bump in the distance.

As I stand on the ledge above my home, I look through my eyes at Tahoma — a gigantic dome of a mountain that elicits a, WOW, nearly every single time that I climb the hill on a clear day. I adjust my gaze to my phone, and look at the digital photo of the same mountain — a mere blip on a screen… a bump of a hill that has blended its way into the background.

I don’t have a fancy lens to take this photo, and I’m sure a better lens would help — but I’m always stunned at the way that our digital world distorts the reality of what we see. I share a photo with friends to show them what this view is like, but the unspoken truth is understood by all: this isn’t really what it looks like. To really see, you need to be there in person… you need to open your own eyes and absorb the landscape around you and see how it makes you feel.

Last year, I wrote a story about my personal decision to break up with my cell phone — and, in particular, my struggle with an addictive social media obsession. At the peak of my social media addiction, I probably spent most of my day either opening and closing Instagram for inexplicable reasons (i.e. validation)… and obsessively documenting every single aspect of my life to share with others. If there was a tiny moment of empty space in my day, I filled it… with my cell phone. This behavior was severely detrimental to my personal well-being and my relationship with my husband. Unfortunately, because cell phone addiction is so ‘socially acceptable’ (just look around in any public space and try to find somebody who isn’t filling a blank space with their phone!), I often masqueraded my addiction as ‘work’ or ‘being productive’.

A firey sunset on the road above my house.

It took the near-catastrophic destruction of my life and marriage to realize that this was, in fact, a huge problem. With my eyes wide open, I saw that my behavior had carved out a lonely crevasse in which I existed: an illusion of togetherness, while I was… indeed… very alone. I had disconnected from all of the things in my life that mattered to me as I connected to a digital world that I had mistaken for the real thing. I’m often reminded of the lyrics of one of my favorite songs by INZO — the song includes words from Alan Watts that say, “… we confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols, and ideas with the real world. Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth. And a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed. And to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event. This is a disaster, for as a result of confusing the real world of nature with mere signs … we are destroying nature.”

You can listen to the song here (I highly recommend dancing!):

My mom once told me a story about my grandpa — he was a compulsive chain smoker who smoked 4 packs of cigarettes a day. My mom hounded him for years to quit smoking… sometimes she would even stand outside the bathroom door while he was coughing in the morning and make her own hacking noises. Eventually, my grandfather realized the destructiveness of this habit and one day, he quit smoking cold turkey. He went from smoking 4 packs per day… (unfiltered cigarettes, I might add)… to smoking NO cigarettes per day.

I have smoked a total of 1/4th of a cigarette in my entire life. When I was in college, I took a few puffs of a cigarette out of curiosity, choked on the smoke… and that was it. While I cannot speak to the addictive nature of nicotine — I can relate to the impulse to do something compulsively, even when it is harmful. When I started using Facebook many years ago… I was, like many of us, sucked into the addictive ‘reality’ of this artificial world. I felt a need to update my Facebook status. Like cigarettes, social media does provide a dopamine hit. When I quit social media last year, I went ‘cold turkey-ish’ on Instagram and I was horrified to realize that I felt actual, physical symptoms of withdraw. The first weekend that I stopped posting constantly on Instagram, I felt disconnected… disoriented… and like I was living in a ‘fog’. I remember sitting in my yard, watching our cats play in the grass and I felt an overwhelming impulse to capture their playfulness and post it to my Instagram account. I was filled with sadness as I realized that I had somehow unlearned my innate ability to find joy from life itself. Instead, I needed the validation of my documented ‘event’ in order to feel any sort of worthiness or satisfaction.

It took a few months for me to adjust to the lack of predictable dopamine hits from social media. At first, I had a very strict, ‘NO SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE WEEKENDS’ rule, because I knew that if I started using it again, I’d be right back in my addiction in no time. I allowed myself to use social media on the Kula Cloth account in small and measured ‘chunks’ — instead of spending most of my day checking Instagram, I allotted ‘bite sized chunks’ of time where I could film silly content, post it and interact in a way that felt genuine and fun. It was a strange experience, because I still love to make funny videos and to find ways to be creative and to interact with others. In fact, to the outside world, the change in my internet habits was probably not very visible at all — I still showed up and posted silly things predictably. But what they didn’t see (or ever see for that matter) was the amount of hours that I spent staring at my phone when I could have been doing literally anything else other than staring at my phone.

It’s been over a year now since I ‘broke up’ with my cell phone, and I’m please to report that I’m still maintaining a very healthy balance with my phone. Yes, there are days when I probably spend a bit too much time using Instagram … but long gone are the days when I have spent the majority of my time living in the world in the palm of my hand. I rarely use my phone on the weekends, and I relish the amount of time that I’ve been able to devote to things that are meaningful to me: painting, playing music, meeting new friends, spending more time with my husband, volunteering at a local assisted living center, and joining an intuitive development group.

It’s easy to buy into the lie that you are ‘uninformed’ or ‘indifferent’ because you don’t spend your day doomscrolling, but I simply cannot believe that is true. In fact, I would venture a guess that some of the biggest changemakers in the world are, indeed, not spending their entire day on their cell phone. Why? Because they wouldn’t want to waste the energy that could go into something meaningful on something that sucks them dry. Many years ago, I created a folder on my cell phone that I called, Time Vampires. This was meant to remind me that using social media was sucking my life into a void — but it didn’t work. Instead, I dove deeper into the void — by choice, because it helped me to avoid the discomfort that I felt within myself. Why would I need to love and accept myself if I could just find that validation from others?

These days, I don’t dislike social media at all — in fact, I’ve made many very real relationships from social media and it forever changed the course of my life in a good way. I love sharing things that are meaningful and I love using it as a way to connect with others. However, when I find myself teetering on obsessive scrolling or searching for validation — I know it’s time to back off. I want to save my creative energy so that I can use it for things that are giving back to the world… not taking away from my own sense of wellbeing and belonging.

Social media is a power platform, and I don’t plan to leave anytime soon. In fact, I think that it’s even more important than ever to use social media as a place to share a tiny glimmer of brightness in the world. But I simply will not give up my real life for a digital one. I’ve never read a story about cutting back on social media usage where the punchline was, “AND MY LIFE SUCKED SO MUCH MORE AFTERWARDS.” Instead, every single article that I’ve ever encountered where a person is sharing their own experience of letting go of a social media addiction has reported a dramatic and drastic improvement in their own sense of happiness and well-being.

Think of it like this for a moment: when you give your attention to social media for hours at a time, you are loaning your consciousness to forces that are outside of your control. Instead of focusing on the present moment, you are unwittingly swept away by the collective consciousness of humanity — and you are subject to its ever-changing, quickly moving whims. When I was at the peak of my social media addiction, I felt like I was getting tossed around in a boat that was being driven by a completely intoxicated Captain who did double duty as an F1 driver in their free time. It was a rollercoaster of emotions: feeling infuriated, disheartened, overwhelmed, afraid, and hopeless… while simultaneously needing validation that I received by posting snippets of my own life in order to give it some type of meaning.

Here’s the thing: when we loan out our consciousness, we lose touch with our feet on the ground. We loan away our own internal power to somebody else and we allow ourselves to get tossed haphazardly into a choppy sea, for which there is no cure for sea-sickness… except to step out of the sea. Suddenly, with our feet on the shore, we realize that we have solid ground to stand on. We can take a few breaths and we are able to look around at where we are in this moment — not at the terrifying reality that lives in our mind — but where we are in this exact moment.

As I’m standing here writing this, I can tell you that I am in my Kula office. I’m using a standing desk, and I’m standing on a cushy mat so that my feet don’t get sore. I can hear my employees chatting in the other room as they pack orders. It’s warm in this room, and I can feel the breath coming in and out of my body. As I stand here, I can simply breathe and notice my body and the feeling of my feet on the ground. I don’t need to solve anything. I don’t need to figure anything out. I’m just here, breathing … and that’s it.

Which begs the question: Where are you right now? If you could describe your life situation right now — the one right in front of you (not in your mind) — what would it be?

Our power to make a difference in the world does not live in wisps of something that we cannot grasp or hold — it exists in the one place where we can make a change: right now.

I don’t know what that change or action or inspiration will be for each of us, but I do know that I never found it when I was seeking something outside of myself. I never found it when I was scrolling Instagram and wallowing in the doom and gloom. I never found it when I was comparing myself to others… or when I was needing validation from strangers. The more and more that I tune into who I am, the more that I am able to access a place that is more loving, more inspired and more open to the goodness in the world around me.

When I broke up with my cell phone, I didn’t know what would bloom in that garden, because it felt like dead soil… the charred remnants of time that could have been spent nurturing my actual existence on this planet. But, instead, that seemingly lifeless dirt has been watered and has bloomed into a space that allows for the multitude of things to exist: the silliness and joy of sharing goofy videos and ideas with friends on social media, the ability to walk away from my phone and leave it behind when I know that it is no longer contributing to the greater good, and… sometimes… a place in the space between those moments too. When you are rooted in the real world, you begin to love it so much that the phone no longer becomes tempting. An emoji is not a substitute for a real hug. Time spent laughing with friends is not a place holder for an ‘lol’. And a photo of a sunrise will never capture the way I feel when look through my own two eyes at that massive mountain waking up on the horizon.

When I hold up my cell phone, it peers out at the world with a cluster of lenses embedded in its metallic shell … but when a human gazes out at the world, we can see not only through our eyes, but also through our hearts. And, maybe, the heart is the lens that makes all the difference. Maybe the heart is the lens that shows the things that are real.

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Friends — I am wishing you all a beautiful week of ease, peace and stillness. Tapping into the present moment is not ‘doing nothing’ — it is, in fact, one of the most powerful things that we can do. As we step out of our mind and into our hearts, we create a change not only within ourselves, but within the world around us.

I’m sending you so much love, wherever and however you are today.