a day without news...

Always something happening, and people talking about the happening, and sharing links about the happening, and always things happening of national importance.

I long for the power to cast a sleep spell across the world, and let everyone lie back, recline, and rest their eyes.

For one day, all bullets sleep. For one day, all cruel barbs and thoughtless words flame out before they touch the tongue. All sportsmen decline to appear, and no one is concerned about their absence. For just one day, the traffic lights hold still. No one drives, anyway. We just rest. Absolutely nothing happens. No one is born. No one dies. Nothing changes for one day.

We are drowning in the ocean of noise, of events, of human life pouring at us from every haunted windowpane, where ghosts flicker, and pinging beeps demand the buttons be pushed. We are drowning in this ocean of news.

Most of us have forgotten that we are, each of us, the drop that contains the whole ocean, and not a drifting particle of it, separated from our true place in the flood and flow.

For just one day, I imagine a day without news.

We all stay home. The televisions don't turn on. There are plenty of leftovers in the fridge. The dogs are walked. The cats are fed. The children hide in their rooms reading books and playing board games. And we, the grown and serious, drink tea and watch the flowers bloom in the yard or the windowsill garden, and for just one day there is no news to distract us from the sea inside. Our journey into the silent land would bring us all such peace, a sabbath rest and a stillness of mind, and books, glorious books, to fill us up with the things too often drowned out by the NOWNOWNOW tides of updates and outbreaks and statements and developments.

Still the mind.

For just one day.