Only somewhat related to gardening...

A couple of days before the new year arrived, I decided to take a step back from facebook.  With wi-fi everywhere I go and an iPad, it had gotten to be quite a habit for me: wake up, check facebook, look at every single notification all day, anytime I was bored, before bed.  All of these few checks adding up to who knows how much productive time!!

One of my friends had, at one point, deleted her facebook account.  Now, I'm not going to go that far.  Facebook is, for me, a way to keep in touch with all the people I know from living all over.  I love seeing pictures of kiddos and knowing what's going on in my friends' lives, especially when I don't get to see them every day.  I have a very small list of people that I'm friends with on facebook, people that I am really friends with in real life.  I don't often just sit on facebook, definitely don't play games, etc. However, I started wondering what the benefit was for me to be constantly on facebook.

In other words, a little personal gardening needed to be done.  =)  I want to make sure that the friends that I love and value get the treatment they deserve.  A little bit of this is a re-ordering of my life too.  I've been known to give and give until that's the basis of my friendships, which is not fair to me.  I need to re-evaluate both what and who are important to me every great once in a while.

Since I've stepped back, I've sent more texts and e-mails to friends because I was thinking about them randomly.  I've picked up the phone to call my family more often.  I've also found that no one has noticed my absence from constantly checking facebook, or at least no one has commented on it.  =)  All the things I've learned from gardening relate to real life: patience, nurturing, tenderness, balance.  I know, like any good gardener, that I need to find my balance, and I trust that I will soon.