I’ve become a huge Twitter fan. I’m constantly on it, perhaps to much for my own good. But I like the challenge of growing a following and I love how I can interact with people. I especially love it when someone drops me a note to tell me that one of my books touched them. I think this is what a community should be. People reaching out and touching other people even if it’s only just for the briefest of moments.
Of course, Twitter will never take the place of real, warm body, face-to-face interaction. It’s not intended to be. It’s a connection point. It’s more like a personal letter used to be back in the old days. Some of us are old enough to remember what it was like to receive a letter from someone we knew and how excited we were to read it. Before we were married, my wife and I exchanged letters. It’s been 38 years and she still has them tucked away in a trunk. Twitter is something like that. Someone, somewhere is interacting with you, connecting with you at some level. It just happens to be in near real time and in less than 280 characters.
But if you take a moment and read through your Twitter feed, you can come away feeling depressed and discouraged. There are so many negative Twitter postings that it can really suck the life out of you. It would almost seem that if you filtered out all the tweets involving politics, you’d have nothing left to talk about. Gloom, despair, and injustice seem to be the topic of the hour, day, week and season. It’s enough to make you want to turn off everything and hide under your blankets.
But I try to avoid all that. There’s enough of that in the world. I want to be uplifting. Recently someone sent me a private message thanking me for all the jokes I tell. She said she was just about to delete her twitter account because she couldn’t stand all the negativity. Then she started following me and reading my posts. They make her laugh and brighten her day. As a matter of fact, several people have sent me notes thanking me adding a little laughter to their day. I like that. Their notes brighten my day.
I tell a lot; I mean a lot of jokes on Twitter. They’re funny, stupid and corny. They’re uplifting. I avoid politics. I try to avoid things that are going to make you sad or angry. There’s enough grief in this world. I choose to be more like sunshine to brighten days than like the gloom of dark cloudy days. Why not do the same?
~Ralph
Twitter @NorthernOvation
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