Monday Moos at FTLOB

Today I'm inspired by the Mondays Moos questions over at For the Love of Blogs. I think King Corvid poses a really important query: What do you do when you run out of things to do on the internet?

My first instinct is to answer this question with the all-too-familiar, "Well, I peruse Facebook [because Facebook is somehow outside of the internet, since it is an app on my phone]. And when Facebook bores me, I log out. Then I find myself bored so I log in again and peruse Facebook." This infinite loop, though, doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. When the electronics go off, what is left? And if this question is hard to answer, is my internet lifestyle verging on unhealthy? Forget verging... if there is nothing but the internet, then I am already there.

My husband and I canceled our cable television service a few months ago, choosing instead to rely completely on internet resources such as hulu.com for all our guilty pleasures. All the books I read are now on my iPad's Kindle app - sure, this isn't the internet, but it still represents a "connected" electronic device. Many of my connections with friends these days are done via text messaging. There's not even a need to dust off the ol' Monopoly board... it can be played on my iPhone.

Something about this seems so wrong. The internet, particularly the blogosphere, can be incredibly beautiful. It can be a celebration of life, a showcase of what so many of our brothers and sisters in humanity experience that we would never know otherwise. I can't tell you how many times I've been inspired by strangers and their pictures, words, videos, and designs. But has the internet become the ultimate in vicarious living for me?

I think that there is never no more internet to see. We will never truly run out of things to do on the internet - but we should. We can spend our days with constant inspiration at our fingertips, or we can take that inspiration and translate it into action. When I run out of things to do on the internet, I want to live life. Experience things that could fill pages and pages of fascinating blogs, the likes of which would be irresistible to the general web surfing public. I want to enjoy the things that would earn me the title of blogger of the month, or things that would generate hundreds of comments, or things that would inspire others.

But I want to be experience life, and be totally content to never put it on a blog, in a text message, as a status update, or in a tweet. Because I'll be too busy breathing in beauty to ever have time for any of it.