I find myself crying in front of my computer lately. Sometimes it is late at night when my beautiful wife and kids are sleeping. Sometimes it is in the morning when my wife is at work and I am sitting down in front of the computer while my kids are eating breakfast in the kitchen with me. Sometimes they are not full blown tears, just the advance scouts making my eyes red as they beat through the underbrush and alert my endocrine system to ready the heavy artillery. Sometimes I am typing as honest to goodness tears course down my cheeks.
I am not depressed nor sad generally. I am and always have been a very positive person in thought, word and deed. I definitely have been in an emotionally fragile and receptive state since the birth of Thing One three years ago; there is really nothing like parenthood to both open your heart up to more love than you ever thought was humanly possible and simultaneously leave you in a semi-crazed, sleep deprived state.
But no, this is more than that. I was no less sleep deprived nor full of love for the last 2 1/2 years before I joined the Steem community, and I wasn't tearing up in front of my computer while looking at my Facebook feed.
What is happening is hard to explain. Sometimes I am crying because I have felt a jolt of connection with a complete stranger while reading a post. I feel like I am regularly being drawn through my computer screen into another person's heart, into their dreams and their fears and the things they don't think anyone knows and the things they wish they could say out loud. I feel like I am stumbling into another life. But why does this make me cry?
In some cases it is easy to say why I tear up. I would not be surprised if many people teared up while reading @jessandthesea's post "If You're Almost Raped but Never Tell Anyone About It, Does It Still Make a Sound?" She is a beautiful writer who opens herself up completely and asks some hard questions about herself while offering no answers. Sometimes there are no answers. Maybe this is why I cried. Maybe I cried for the other women I know who have had similar experiences or worse.
It is harder to say why I teared up while looking at this photograph of the inside of the dome of the Pantheon in Rome taken by the talented @mibreit-photo.
It seems to be accelerating. The things that trigger it seem to be multifarious and manifest everywhere. It is bleeding into my personal life. I am moved to tears at the beauty of my children. I am crying by the side of a stream watching a great blue heron. But most often I am crying in front of my computer.
At first it was easier to put a finger on why this was happening. I joined the @curie organization as a curator on @misterakpan's nomination the week of October 15th. There are many guidelines that @curie curators follow but the primary objective is to reward exceptional original posts by authors who are persistent with little success.
In the beginning I used a very analytical process to determine if I should submit a post. I carefully examined the post with every @curie guideline in mind and compared it to other posts I had seen approved, and other posts I had seen rejected by the reviewers. I second-guessed and overthought my way out of many submissions when my gut had told me originally, "submit this". I looked at the guidelines as if they were strict rules that I had to follow to the letter, to the point of ignoring my own instinctive knowledge that a post was exceptional... but eventually I came to understand that many of the guidelines were just that - "guidelines" - and their intention was to help curators toward recognizing exceptional quality in posting.
Soon I began to use a much more gut-level approach. I found it most effective to turn off the rational brain process and just let my heart and my parasympathetic nervous system do the thinking. Now when my gut tells me a post is exceptional, I will submit it unless I find an obvious reason not to (e.g. post turns out to be plagiarized or is a repost of material available elsewhere online, etc.).
Well okay then! So I started listening to my gut. What does this have to do with my tears of late?
Now when I first start to read a post while curating I am opening myself up to it fully. I am really allowing myself to make an emotional connection with the author and if I can't make that connection then it is on to the next post. But many times I do make that connection. And here is where the tears started. I would cry when submitting a post that I knew was going to get a large upvote, because I knew what this was going to mean to the poster. I could feel what it would mean. It is definitely a privilege and an honor to be a part of a selfless organization like @curie that has given so much to this community.
But still this isn't getting at the whole story. I already told you the tears are spreading. This morning I found myself crying while reading my friend @torico's post "Fear and Dreaming". Again, here for this particular post, maybe this is no great mystery. I do not think you would have to be an empath to feel the fear and anxiety and raw honest truth that came pouring out from @torico in that post.
But I would not have cried over @torico's post in the past. I know this to be true. I know that something has changed inside of myself. Some walls have dissolved, long standing walls. I know that I have spent a large part of my life controlling my emotions, and now I find them to be running free in the prairie of my being, unbroken horses that suddenly seem so fierce and beautiful that I do not even want to put a saddle back on them. I do not want to bridle these horses I am riding.
I finally put my finger on it this morning - or maybe I finally pulled my finger away from the hole in the dyke and allowed the light that was always there to shine through. In the past when I have encountered sadness and tragedy online, in news reporting or even in my own Facebook feed, it was always easy to say, "there is nothing I can do about this."
There is nothing I can do.
If I can do nothing, then allowing this event to impact me does not make any sense.
If all I can do is try to spread love and positivity in the world immediately around me, then allowing myself to become sad and depressed by things happening far away from me physically in internet land is counter productive.
I built walls and dug moats and set sentinels to patrol the parapets and I did not allow a true emotional connection to happen because I could do nothing.
Now when I ask myself if I can do anything, the answer is not so easy. The answer is maybe. The answer might be yes.
Steem has opened my eyes up to the possibility of actually effecting positive change in the world on a scale that I could never have dreamed about just a few short months ago. We all, every one of us here on Steem, stand on a precipice. We do not know what is over that edge. There are the same things trying to hold us back that have always held humans back. There is greed here on Steem. There is malice. There is nepotism. There is jealousy. But there are also unlimited possibilities with unlimited potential. There are people giving freely of their time and energy to form a community of sharing.
I find myself effecting meaningful positive change in other people's lives because of my affiliation with @curie.
I find myself cautiously willing to believe that my friend @sharonomics may actually have thought of a way to help solve poverty and wealth inequality by integrating a sharing-economy model (think rideshare, bikeshare, roomshare, etc.) with algorithmic cryptocurrency trading. Sound too good to be true? Take a look at AlgoShare.net and Sharonomics.com and stay tuned for the upcoming announcement by @sharonomics on a partnership with the Autonio decentralized AI trading system.
I find myself sending a small charitable donation halfway around the world and I know for 100% certainty that my Steem actually made it to the intended destination and helped poor schoolchildren in Nigeria and did not pad the pockets of the board of directors of a charitable organization... and I know this because the transactions are public record in the @youarehope account on the Steem blockchain. @sircork has seen the potential in the worldwide user base, feeless transactions and public/unalterable nature of transaction records here and is leveraging it to create maybe the world's very first truly transparent and accountable worldwide charitable organization. I probably do not need to tell you that I cried while reading this post from @sircork / @youarehope.
Now when I ask myself the question, is there anything I can do? The possibilities that come thundering at me are more numerous than the drops of water in a wave that sweeps me up with excitement and deposits me in a place I have never been before in my life.
A place where I can make a difference.
That is Steem to me. This is the place where I can make a difference. And I am so glad that the fortifications that protected my heart are crumbling. I do not need them anymore.
Please consider supporting @curie by voting @curie for witness. As one human being to another I can tell you that I have never been prouder to be a part of something than I am now to be a part of @curie.
Again I find tears in my eyes while I type this. But now I do not wonder what is wrong with me. I welcome the tears.
Post Cover Image Credit:
I created the cover image from a photo of Saint-Martin d'Arc-en-Barrois ran through the Deep Dream Generator. Here is the original wikicommons photo of the statue of Saint-Martin d'Arc-en-Barrois.