love is bigger

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” ~ Albert Einstein

Today is one of my favorite days of the year, second only to Christmas. It doesn’t mean a whole lot, Thanksgiving that is, unless you allow it to. For me, my Thanksgiving is saturated to the brim with family and friends, and it probably took me 26 years to appreciate it. This year is the first time I’ll celebrate Thanksgiving with not only my amazing wife, but also my little girl. For that alone, I have reason to rejoice and be thankful.

To each of you who have played any role in my life whatsoever, from my closest friends to those authors/speakers/musicians/whoever who have played any role in my life, from inspiration to reflection to downright pissing me off, I am eternally thankful for all of it. All of it has forced a reaction of some sort from me, and since our time on this planet is so short I am thankful for any and all emotional responses in my life.

I think Don Miller said it best in “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,”

“What I’m saying is that life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.”

Lets be impressed today, if only for one day.

Matt Hammit (lead singer of Sanctus Real, fellow Toledoan and member of my church) and his wife Sarah will have their story told on national television tonight. If you are unfamiliar why their story will be told on World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer at 6:30 on ABC, well then I think you should take a look at this…

http://bowensheart.com/our-story/

In short, it’s an incredible story involving incredible people led by an incredible God.

It’s been almost two entire days since I’ve logged in to twitter for any reason.

It’s been almost as long since logging into Tumblr.

Facebook, well I’m still checking that, but now only about once or twice a day.

In this time, I think I’ve come up with how things are going to shake out for me.

For whatever reason, in addition to just not “feeling” social medial anymore, I’ve also become somewhat cynical and bitter about it. My tweet the other day about the state of photography is something the me of two years ago would have slapped myself silly for. I don’t want to be that guy. So, in the best interest of myself, my family, and everyone else, I’m stepping back for an indefinite amount of time. Because of my already “meh” attitude towards it all, I cannot even guarantee I’ll be back.

Yet, I feel some what responsible to declare this, and how things will work in the future for me, so here goes.

I will no longer be checking twitter, except for maybe a once a day check for mentions/direct messages. I haven’t had my twitter client open on my laptop in two days, and I’ve already deleted the apps off my iphone, and to be honest I don’t miss the noise. However, twitter will still be linked to my tumblr, and I am going to reverse the flow so that my facebook updates twitter. In addition, I will still use twitter to post about LGP-related things such as new images, new tours, etc… I totally understand if you don’t wish to follow me anymore because of it, since it will be mostly business and one-way communication.

I will be active mostly on facebook. Not much to say on the subject, it’s just where most of my family and close friends are. I am however limiting my friends to family, very close friends, and a very select few others… not even a lot of my ex-co workers are on my list anymore. I want to privatize a little. If you want to stay in touch, I’d recommend checking out the Love is Greater Photography facebook page, as that is totally open and will still have some of my flavor.

Tumblr… tumblr I am just not sure about right now. I am thinking about keeping it active just so the general public can still see some photos of Rebecca (since the ones I’ll be putting on facebook regularly will of course, be friends-only). But I honestly don’t know if that will always remain.

So there you have it. My close personal twitter friends, I’m sure we’ll all stay in touch via email/texts/phone calls/skype… at least I hope. This will definitely be an exercise in finding out if these relationships will continue to go on despite social media, though I have little doubt it will. Everyone else, you can always contact me via email if you need something…. joshuarwhite )at( gmail DOT com.

I’ve been on the internet since before it was the internet. Or, at least how we know it now. I remember getting on BBS’ with my old Packard Bell computer, playing games like The Legend of the Red Dragon, Mafia Wars (when it was cool), and Major Mudd. Chatting with just a few local people at a time with ridiculous handles (Almighty Q [from a Denis Leary stand up routine], and Dreamgoat [which I still use] were my firsts), and trading snippets of the highly revolutionary .mp3’s that would take five hours to download over my 9600 modem, only to be played in a very broken WinAmp. This was nearly fifteen years ago.

I was on Compuserve, WOW!, AOL, and just about every other provider. My status as an early adopter, I got from my parents. They gave me the means to be on everything early, early in life, and that’s how it’s always been.

I bought my first domain name and ran my first website (put together with Microsoft Frontpage, baby!) probably thirteen years ago now… I can still see it using the Wayback Machine at Archive.org (don’t ask me for the domain, I’ll never tell.)

I started blogging twelve years ago. Livejournal, Blurty, Diaryland, GreatestJournal, Xanga, Blogger, Wordpress, self-hosted… I’ve done them all, and still can go to the ones that are active and read my ridiculous posts.

Lately, I’ve been having a crisis of social interaction. I find myself participating less and less on twitter, blogging less, and frequenting facebook not quite as often. Sure, I still make a cynical quip about the state of photography, or post a random photo of my daughter here and there… but nothing near as intense as I used to. I just haven’t felt like it lately.

People say to me that I should think of all amazing memories social media has made for me… I cannot deny it. I’ve met some of my very favorite people of all time through twitter and nothing can change that. However, as Tallahassee* would say “believe it or not, even twinkies have an expiration date.”

Tonight I saw a post by Donald Miller, one of my favorite authors, talking about his thought process on whether or not he should kill his blog. It echoes every other thought I’ve had, as well as seen from MANY others about the state of instant gratification we find ourselves in. Instantaneously, people can spew opinions, write out half-processed thoughts, and be a ridiculously popular blogger. Don spoke mainly about the death of the written word, and if blogging had anything to do with it. John Mayer wrote roughly the same idea (which has since disappeared) in regards to music a few weeks ago, that due to the instantaneous nature of social media people are putting out crap on a regular basis in the name of “getting your name out there” without the crucial step people USED to have to take, which is to constantly refine their craft before making it public.

And then, I posted that quote from Smallville the other day, talking about how our “armchair bloggers” have created a generation of critics instead of leaders, and I found myself agreeing with the sentiment.

My internet-friends would be the first to point out that it’s all what you make of it. I agree, to a point. People make choices how much they put into something, or how much they take out of it… but sometimes I wonder if we’d all just be better off if they shut the internet off for a week. Take the choice away. Do people really choose what’s best for them, if given the option of something that maybe not the best option? I’m not so sure…

I don’t say all this to just bash on people, because it’s not true. Social media has it’s uses and I am all for it. I just don’t think my place is in it anymore.

Don Miller is considering shutting his blog down after a year (rough guess) of really being in it. It only took him a year to realize what has taken me twelve years. A testament to how bull-headed I am I suppose.

Practically speaking, I have no idea what all this means. I’m just spewing thought process right now in a totally hypocritical way to what I’m talking about. Right now this is probably my longest blog post in a long time. I see the possibility of killing tumblr altogether, and perhaps twitter as well, existing solely in the realm of facebook and even then doing a serious culling to my personal friends list and ONLY being friends with the people I’ve already described. Lately I’m really into simplicity.

Let me be perfectly clear, my current feelings are in no way relevant to my past successes and amazing stories that have come from social media, nor is it an indictment against my social media acquaintances. As I’ve stated on other blogs repeatedly, I feel like I am just in a different place now. My life is pretty full, relatively speaking, so I’m not really interested in meeting new people. Instead, I’d rather focus on the few amazing friends I’ve met through the internet, my immediate local community of family and friends, and get back to the way things used to be, and really process art, the creative process, and communication… slowly. I’m so worried that we’re all in such a rush to do anything and everything, including sharing our every thought in 140 characters or less, that perhaps we’re missing what’s really important all around us.

I just keep thinking about the way things were before, whatever. People lived perfectly happy lives before the internet, before cars, before cell phones, before email, before… whatever. People could argue that perhaps it was even happier.

I guess I just don’t want to place my hope on technology “doing” it for me anymore.

*shameless Zombieland reference

Okay, so forget the corny place it comes from, this little mini-speech smacked me straight in the gut tonight. Let me set it up…

This comes from the tenth and final season of Smallville, a show about Superman before he was Superman on The CW. In this episode, another masked hero comes out and publicly admits who he is. Oliver Queen, aka The Green Arrow is doing an interview discussing why…

Oliver: “No, you’re right. I’m not special. This is not about who I am, but about what I do. And I don’t think I’m the first rich boy that felt that way. It was John F. Kennedy who first said ‘ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’”

Interviewer: “So now you’re comparing yourself to a fallen hero of this country?”

Oliver: “Well why not? He saw the hero in all of us. I’m not dwelling on revenge for past atrocities, or looking ahead to what I could possibly gain from a few tax breaks, drilling oil wells in the ocean, or putting up razor-wire fences to keep out immigrants who only want what our grandparents wanted. In this world of armchair bloggers who’ve created a generation full of critics instead of leaders, I’m actually doing something. Right here, right now, for this city, for my country. And I’m not doing it alone. You’re damn right I’m a hero.”

smlmldn:

Now it makes sense… Finally.

fakescience:

Just a warning… this is not something I plan on talking about a lot. I’ve made my struggles with weight public so long, that I’m starting to realize perhaps I should try and just do it, instead of talking about it.

That said, here we are. November. Our daughter is eleven weeks old, our life has settled down, we have a way to intentionally buy groceries and meal plan again (thank you, taxpayers). Our excuses for not getting healthy are waning.

Today Ryanne and I are getting back on the healthy train. We’re doing what has worked for us so great in the past, and that is simply counting calories, eating healthy foods, and exercise. We got a new food scale yesterday, which I can tell you I already see how beneficial it’s going to be. We previously had a simple analog scale that only had a little container to weight things in, but this is a digital scale that can be zeroed out (so that you can put a glass/bowl on it, zero it, then fill it with juice/food to the exact weight). So far, I’m a big fan.

Anyway, just letting everyone know that if we deny some food, this is why =)