Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Facebook Break

 From my files, female cardinal in maple tree.

I decided that I was going to take a break from Facebook to minimize the amount of negativity I was finding around me. Well, that lasted three days until I was back on the site. Yesterday morning I got a notice that someone had mentioned me in a post. I wanted to find out more and that was it. I not only read that post, but started scrolling. But you know what? I'm not that sorry that I didn't last longer because Facebook is not all bad. Here are a few things I saw this morning that I enjoyed.

1. A bad joke-"What was Harper Lee's favorite drink? Toquilla mocking bird." 

2. Beautiful pictures of a crescent moon from Maine

3. A picture of my grandmother with her older daughter and her first granddaughter. 

4. A picture of a baby gorilla. My nephew is a primate zoo keeper at the National Zoo and every time there is a shut down of the zoo, he posts a picture a day of one of the primates with a clever caption. The pictures are great and the captions are even better.

5. A link to a song by the Mama's and Papa's. One friend frequently posts links to old songs. I appreciate that she does the work of finding them.

6. A picture of a tree made from puzzle pieces done by a friend. I'm going to have to investigate this more because it was looked really neat.

7. A recipe for harvest stew.

8. Mention of a local event I want to see.

9. Notice about a happening in my neighborhood.

It took some discipline to just focus on these things. I had to scroll quickly past several negative, hostile posts to see them, but I did. I rarely read any negative posts in their entirety before, but would read enough to know what they were about--and that was too much for me. But focusing on the fun stuff, was just right this morning. I'm not going to avoid FB for now. My new goal is to keep scrolling when I sense that a post is negative and to enjoy the rest. After all, I'm looking for positivity and there is a lot to be found on FB.

Another day, I'll talk about the amount of time that can be spent on places like FB.