Post Indy thoughts 1

I have been hearing more and more that places where we get immediate feed back seem to be taking away from inner reflective time. That we can easily post and hem and haw if we are liked but then never really go any deeper with a surface thought.  We need to reflect and so currently this is making me think about my social media usage. Perhaps I will limit days or hours that I use it. To be more regulated. I definitely can fall into a trap about over use and I think that perhaps that's something I just need to know about myself. To set limits and stick with them.

But blogging. I think is good. I don't really do it for the fame, for the clicks, for the likes. I do it because it is how I get things out of my head. How I sometimes keep track of things for memories.  So I wanted to reflect a little about our month away now that we are back.

I'll start with something I liked about Indy, which is how easy it was to bike with a family there.  How it was super accessible and just fun to do. It led us to ditch the car many days for a family biking experience.

Perhaps because I am normally big on connection, and have plugged in deep around me at home. I think for some reason I was okay with the anonymity for a month. I guess in some ways, I still had some connections with people back home throughout the month and we did have some good friends visit once, but I didn't feel the drive to connect anymore than a smile or a kind word here or there.

I think because it wasn't the first time doing a month away, it wasn't nearly as scary doing it. There is something about that initial exposure to something that is just shocking. While there was a disorienting feeling, we were able to get a routine down and just worked with it.

Indy needs a play space of some sort for children and families downtown. While this city is gorgeous, there isn't anything where a family can just relax and play a while in the downtown so much.  Either a downtown play space or splash pad that is classy would work well here. There are a lot of beautiful spaces and I wish there were things there to draw the people to them. It wasn't say there was nothing. If you looked hard you could find things, but it wasn't obvious. But maybe that is a different thing entirely. Maybe they don't want to do the obvious because they want you to think outside the box.  But at the same time a beautifully done water play area can be quite appealing to a young family and bring in more people to an area that maybe only sees business folks or a single person.

I think where my heart stretched a bit was with the homeless situation there.  I think now in Cleveland, there are more present people too, so I wonder what is bringing about this visible rise to the population without a home. I want to at the very least learn more about the forgotten population.  I think I am going to try and read more books about the topic and also figure out how I can help locally with this and perhaps involve the kids too. I know I am usually scared to go outside my comfort zone, but I think this is something I am called to take a step forward into.