On January 1 of this year my friend Tyler Merritt posted the following:
I remember seeing it late that evening whilst mindlessly perusing the book of faces before bed.
When I read his post I thought, "I wonder if I could take on such a task myself?" What would it mean to actually share love in the form of publicly writing about the person in social media each day?"
All that said, I didn't want to write long status updates. I'm not usually a fan of them. It's most likely why I like Twitter more than Facebook. I like having to struggle to get the though out in a short burst. I like the 140 character boundary.
I'm not always good at it but I like it.
So I decided to post them as a blog. A #thisisctazylove2016 blog on my website. Why not? So on the second day of the year I began my own journey into what I affectionately call the hashtag mutiny against the antisocial ways of social media. A sort of turning this Cracker Barrel, my opinion's pure and yours in not,squawk fest into something more interesting. A celebration of life lived and love given.
In the process I found that the posts on politics or guns or equal rights or anything else started to disappear from the anger/fight parts of my brain and I started taking these things less personally and began looking at them from a broader perspective. I began to feel compassion EVEN for the people with which I disagreed.
It felt good to write words of appreciation for people. It also felt vulnerable to do so. It was much easier to bark my disapproval for things knowing full well there'd be some sort of a fight coming my way and a comment section filled with statements none of these people would actually make standing face to face with one another.
Another byproduct of this experience has been the process itself.
I find myself each day wondering and thinking about who will be the subject of my hashtag installment for the day. Some days I wake up with the name in my mind. Some days it happens in the course of the day. Sometimes, dear lord, sometimes it doesn't come and I have to go searching at ten o'clock at night to find someone to write about.
In this experience I made one rule for myself. NO EDITS!
I quickly made one change to that rule though. Since many days I write these in Notes on my iPhone and then copy and paste with pictures on my blogging app there are times for fixing some autocorrects I missed while typing.
I use this sort of experience a way of self service too. It is a practice of free writing with the results read by anyone with a connection to the subject matter of the day.
I'm aware that my grammar is not the goodest and I don't wrote smart all the time. In this instance I treat that with less respect than the overall sentiment I'm trying to get out.
I'm on this #thisiscrazylove2016 train for a while yet. If'ns y'all want to climb on board is suggest you give it a try. It's a cool way to spend the days.