Regurgitationalistics

Man has never invented a single thing (as of this writing)… ever never… nothing new… never… not one new element has been introduced into life. All we’ve done is ‘assemble’ things to be something else, and we call it ‘inventing’. Semantics, I know… but our thoughts and the many things we voice (communicate) have the same tendency… regurgitating things in a different way, but they are the same droning message (repeating news, citing scripture, gossip, etc)… over and again. Like we found a dirty, old, encrusted nickel… polished it up and claimed it as our own… holding it up for the world to see and in turn exclaiming our excitement for this new nickel of ours.

Sure… the word “Regurgitationalistics” doesn’t even exist… well… it might now… since I am using it. Essentially I morphed the word Regurgitation, which fundamentally means; to give back or repeat, especially something not fully understood or assimilated. Now… I am not writing this to teach you some fancy form or regurgitation… rather…

I have noticed that we tend to get all caught up communicating and sharing thoughts, ideas, “news and information” and that we easily fall into the trap of just being talking-heads… mostly. Giving almost NO thought to what we are sharing… just too busy repeating something we heard… something we saw… something someone else shared with us. Almost monkey-like in our zeal to ‘pass along’ some nugget of information… as though we are getting a finders-fee, or accolades for being the one to discover such a nugget… all gleeful and pleased with ourselves.

This rapid-fire means of passing information along is leaving us brainless… training us to think-less about the message(s) we are passing along… giving us that instant gratification that we did society a favor by ensuring this message doesn’t die on my doorstep… at my feet… on my watch…. that it carries on into the future… that somewhere, somehow, someone is touched by it.

So many of our social-websites provide the coolest tools to help us pass-along things that we either find, or their website (feed) has found for us… see… as you are finally realizing (hopefully), these sites ‘watch’ you and track your trends… follow your links… ‘listen’ to your words, and that in turn allows them show you stuff… and you get impressed and ‘touched’ by some moving statement… some touching sunset with the most romantic or spiritual-ish-sounding-probably-true statement… you can just NOT resist posting it to your ‘friends’…. without EVER adding your own commentary… without EVER telling us what ‘that’ means to you… how ‘that’ touched your heart (or mind) and motivated you to share it with us.

Recognizing beauty, quality, even spotting acceptable character traits in others is no place to stop… I mean… passing some lovely photo along to others… even more-so when it has some ‘perfect’ quote in it… is just SO tempting. When you see something like that, you may consider, “oh… I need to show others this ‘nugget of truth’ and pass it along to those around me!”

NOT! Take some time to consider ‘why’ that moves you… ‘why’ it caught your attention… and ‘why’ you are bothering to share it with us. Tell us how that makes ‘you’ feel… what you are experiencing and why that seems to impact you.

OK… maybe you’re not thinking all that deeply about these snippets of information. But, that IS the point… we are learning to NOT have an original thought… we are losing touch with taking the time to consider something before passing it along… to even add ‘our flavor’ to it. No… not change the story and make it your own… just that we need to take a little more time to learn to express something uniquely ours… not passing along someone else’s wittiness, skill, or keen observation.

Many years ago now, I was getting regular texts from a dear friend… a christian brother who has been saved ’bout as long as me… we both were baptized at the same time in the same place. Cass would send me scriptures via texts on my phone. Two things that were bad about this

This was back in the day when text messages cost 10 cents per message (depending on your ‘plan’), and some of the passages he would send would spread across 4 or 6 text messages…. costing me some 60 cents each time!

He never, EVER had any comment about the passage… never EVER prefaced it or followed up with some “and I think” commentary.

One day, I finally texted him back and asked him to either start telling me WHY this scripture inspires him to send it, or stop sending them. Uh… he stopped sending them!

And, that is the core of my point… we get our warm-fuzzies passing things along, but we rarely add anything about the ‘thing’ or what it means to us at that moment… why we are forwarding, why we are tagging, why we are ‘liking’, why we are even making any fuss over it. Technology devices today make it so easy to ‘pass it along’… to quickly let others know and see this ‘magical’ snippet that has moved us.