At some point this past week, it struck me how “noisey” my life is. Of course, working in a school, that’s a given. But that’s obvious noise. So is the television…so is the radio in the car. The silent noise was what gave me pause, and mainly about the things I read online. The blogs I read…the posts on social networking sites. It seems as if it had suddenly become a jumbled mess of music videos, funny pictures, hurtful gossip, passive-aggressive status updates, and nothing of real importance.

Scrolling through this never-ending mess finally frustrated me enough to do something about it. I took to Facebook and started choosing what updates I wanted to see from people. Some, I just deleted entirely. I’m forever weeding who I follow on Twitter. I even started fresh with my blog list after the holidays (but not to worry….I kept my absolute favorites!).

I think a little occasional online noise filtering is good thing. Our interests change, our priorities change. Trends and people change. I guess what I am after now is authentic story-telling, being able to relate to the bloggers I read, filtering out nasty Facebook gossip, and being more particular about what I choose to give my online time to. This is not to say I’m not occasionally guilty of posting a video on Facebook or fluffing up a post here at my blog with some funny pictures because I’m fresh out of ideas. I just hope I don’t do it enough to annoy. And if I do, I apologize.

I’m really trying to become more aware that sometimes, silence really is golden.