I am no longer what I once was. I am not yet what I will be. I can only be as I am in this moment. This comes to me in a yoga class as I am looking out over my life around where I have been, and who and what it is that I am trying to grow into.

Have you ever noticed how often people angst over what has come before, along with how often we long for what is yet to come? How many of our thoughts go to revisiting, living in, or fighting with, what came before? How much of our attention centers around anticipating, struggling with, or glorifying, what will be? And yet, we can only be whatever it is that we actually are in any given moment. We can only change, act, create, or anything else we can do or imagine, from this moment.

Can you envision what it would be like to get back all of the hours, days, weeks, months, and ultimately years, that you have spent in your mind in either the past or the future?

It is such a propensity of the ordinary mind to fret over the future, or to drag the past around. Both are a trap. Neither offers happiness. Or peace. Or anything else for that matter that we really want. And yet we do it, over and over and over again. Interestingly enough, as bad as this is for us, it is getting even worse. How? Through the amplification of both of these tendencies brought on by how we are using the technologies.

There was a time when you could leave your past behind. You could make the choice to break from who you were at a younger age, or from ways of being you no longer wanted to be associated with. No more. Everything we are doing is being documented. And saved. Indelibly imprinted on The World Wide Web. (Unless of course, you are rich enough or have the kinds of connections that can make anything go away, but not the kind of power most of us possess.)

And then there are all the ways that we can spend our days polishing and performing the ideal version of the us we most want others to see. We can create our future yearning, our idealized self without actually making a single change in how we are living. Without any of it actually being real.

I often joke with my college students, “Thank God, nothing I did in high school, college, or through my early twenties lives on through the Internet.” They laugh. Partly because somewhere they are nervous for themselves, and what they have posted. And partly because that admittance on my part, surprises them; for in many ways, and in the most important of ways, the woman that stands before them in no way resembles what came before. And that is exactly how I want it.

Why would I want to move beyond and away from aspects of my past? Because I want the freedom to be able to reinvent myself; to cast off aspects that were not the truth of who I was, and therefore who I truly am. I want the chance to move beyond old habits and ways of being that do not serve my current values and ideals. I want the opportunity to be different. I want the space to transform.

Don’t we all deserve this? The chance to remake and reshape ourselves into the best version that we can possibly imagine for ourselves? And to actually do it for real? By that I mean, not the fantasized versions that so many post, calling it them and a life, but honest to goodness transformation of who we are and how we live through real world blood, sweat, and tears.

The opportunity to move beyond our old selves and to claim a true and authentic representation of who we are is not just necessary for us, it is necessary for the world. We are here to learn and to grow in the service of our fullest expression with the result being a greater contribution to all of Life. How will this be possible for the generations coming up where everything they have ever done will follow them around like a bad smell for the rest of their lives? How will they ever be allowed to be solid with who they are at any given moment when the driving zeitgeist is to be constantly reinventing yourself in cheap, showy, unreal, and shallow ways; performing that out in virtual reality as the new and improved version of yourself?

My children are in Nashville and Seattle. Sometimes we speak one or more times in a week. Sometimes several weeks will go by with no contact. I have no rules, nor any expectations around the number of connections we make within a specified time period. And when I am not holding myself up to what I often see happening around me, I feel the rightness of this for our relationship; for what I am personally after is quality, not quantity. What I am after is a give and take in relationship that honors where everyone is at; recognizing each person’s need for both sovereignty and interconnection, while understanding that that ebbs and flows over time.

This flies in the face of how many of us relate to one another now via our devices (With “to” versus “with” being the operative word). I hear this regularly from college students who text intimate others or parents multiple times a day; even when there is nothing to convey. It is less a communication than a neurotic, obsessive, dogged obligation. Too harsh? Maybe. But when you line up that for all of our ways to be in contact, too many of us do not allow, and are not allowed, any space to exist in the relationship outside of continuous contact, obligation gone bad becomes the most apt description of what is happening between us. For how else would we label how no to little time is allowed for anything of significance to arise or happen to us before we are back in contact again? How else would we label how we leave no to little time anymore to be on our own, or to digest an experience before we report it back out?

These same ever-in-contact students often talk about feeling harangued, dissatisfied, and burdened with so many obligatory and meaningless exchanges. But they find it impossible to break free as this way of doing things has become the new agreed upon currency of love and connection. Without which one risks violating a social norm of what it looks like to care. Without which one runs the risk of looking like there is not much of a bond between you and those you care about.

Why have we done this to one another? Why do we continue to do something that so burdens and diminishes what is between us? Why have we taken something so precious and so life-giving and reduced it down to a neurotic numbers game. Have we so little faith in each other? Have we so little faith in ourselves to experience life without immediately reporting out every last detail ad nauseam to anyone that we can text?

Texting is not talking. And quantity does not equal quality. It never has, and it never will.

I am in the check-out line at the co-op this week. I often enjoy this time as I get to interact with all kinds of people; many of whom are twenty-somethings, and I love to hear what they are into. Some days it truly inspires me. Some days it truly breaks my heart.

On this day, when I ask the young woman how it’s going, she responds by saying, “Tired.” She then cheerfully adds, “But that’s OK-I’m always tired.” Even though I know that social etiquette would say that now it’s my turn to say something, I pause. She then picks the conversation back up by saying, “Well, it’s my own fault. My hobby keeps me up all night.” Hmm. At first I am wondering if it’s something like reading, knitting, cooking, or art. But because it somehow doesn’t seem to fit in with being up all night, I ask, “What’s your hobby?” She smiles a big, wide grin at me and says, “Gaming.” Pause. Pause. Pause.

Truly, I do not know how to respond. Where would I even begin? Since when has spending time in front of a screen been given the lofty designation of a hobby in the life of a human being? Since when did we collectively agree that depriving your body of one of its most basic and health-promoting needs is something to be proud of? And since when did women start jumping into a pathologically imbalanced male-dominated arena, leaving us now just as vulnerable as the men in making the wrong thing essential? It is so eerily reminiscent of women trying to be like men in the work force; ultimately putting us on the same level as them when it comes to rates of stress and heart disease.

Because the woman part hits me the hardest, I decide to wade into the pool on this one.

“Oh,” I say, “I haven’t run into many female gamers.” She tells me that’s because up until a few years ago it was really hard to break into the gaming circles if you were a woman, but that now it’s gotten way easier. “Why’s that?” I ask. Because, she tells me, the companies have figured out that they are losing money by not including women, so now they are much better at monitoring these sites and squelching bad and exclusive behavior on the part of male gamers.

“As a matter of fact,” she tells me, “there was a recent study that proves that the number of female gamers is the largest growing group. Even bigger than teenage boys!” She is absolutely glowing with pride as she tells me this. Pause. Pause. Pause. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. “Now they’ve got the women,” is all that I can think. This is truly terrifying.

This precious young woman has not even begun to consider what this “hobby” of hers is doing to her physical health, and her ability to be in her real life in any kind of a meaningful way. She has not stopped to consider that the open access that the companies have created for her and other women like her is being done at the expense of not only her body, but her very heart and soul sensibilities as a woman. She has not stopped to consider that this league of which she is now a part is a littered graveyard full of wasted human potential.

The irony of it all? Her favorite game is Monster Hunter. What she loves most of all is the skill set she has developed. The one that allows her to identify where the demons are and, even getting good enough to be one step ahead of their clever, demonic, and dark adaptations at eluding extermination. Would that she turn these skills on the very real monsters that haunt and elude her in the real world, she might just have a chance of getting out with her very own life.