“I’m an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.” – Jesse Ball, The Curfew.

I love the Internet, I’ve written on it and about it for much of my adult life. The Internet gave me my blog, a place to show my photographs and my writing, a way to earn a living in a remote rural area, precious friends and the freedom to write what I have always wanted to write, to work with the Army Of Good, perhaps the most satisfying experience of my life.

But I have also seen the Internet involve in ways that change and threaten many of us, obliterate boundaries, promote anger and hatred and polarization, and also, in my mind destroyed the very idea of personal space, a precious thing to anyone, but especially to people who see themselves as creative.

So please don’t take this piece as a request to be left alone, or to not dare to write me, or to write and ask if I had you in mind when I wrote it. The answer to all of the above is no. It’s not aimed at you, it’s not all about you, or even me.

Personal space is essential to creativity, thought, or peace of mind. It’s erosion and loss would have and is having a great impact on anyone who wishes to create, and who feels the call of the creative spark.

Personal space is the area surrounding us, sometime described as a “bubble,” a space where we feel secure, that is psychologically ours. It can be a literal space or a symbolic, psychological space.

We need this space to think about our lives, to find hope, to solve problems, to gain strength and perspective, and yes, certainly, to write or paint. We need to have some space around us that is  inviolate, private.

That is hard to do on the Internet where roving and unsupervised or monitored mobs roam freely to  attack people, disrupt their lives and call them names. Hatred is free on line, so are the “friends” of Facebook. I fight all the time to keep my space and boundaries, I lose all of the time.

I don’t know of a great painter or writer or composer who didn’t use personal space as a way to think and experiment, to stumble and fall, to create the best works of their lives.  To have space in and around one’s head to think.

I’ve been writing about threats to personal space in general – and my personal space in particular – for some years now.

And I’ve found that my personal space is getting smaller by the day. Soon it will be gone unless I muster the discipline and will to keep it around me. I’m not sure that is even possible.

I’ve come to see and believe that the Internet and social media have destroyed the very idea of personal space, figuratively and literally. That is an important casualty of the Internet. Ideas barely breathe before they are challenged, discarded, and vanish into the ether.

An idea is no longer really considered, or widely debated. it is mostly a microbe in a vast universe or other microbes, almost all of them sailing off into the ether.

More than anything else, the digital demons have entered our consciousness and taught us and taught us to hate people who see the world differently than we do, the left hates the right, the right hates the left, the independents hate everybody on either end. Think what that does to personal space.

And then the news, we are bombarded from every waking moment to the last by evidence of human’s cruelty and barbarity to one another, bombs, murders, raging debates, fires and injustice. A personal space buster, 24/7.

This morning, I went into Albany to a studio there to be interviewed for an hour for a BBC documentary on the subject of keeping personal space in the digital world.

The producer read some of my posts on the blog and called me up to ask if I would participate.

I said sure. This is a hopeless fight I’ve been waging for years, I just feel morally obliged to raise the alarm once in a while. They asked me if I thought personal space could survive. I said it had already died, by and large. The Trappist Monk Thomas Merton saw it coming and retreated to his hermitage.

But even he wrote hundreds of letters each month and scores of books. Thank God for his creativity he died before the Internet really took off. I shudder to think of his Inbox. Or if Thoreau’s sanity if he had Facebook in his little cabin. He was the King of Personal space.

Personal space has many meanings, one is the distance from another person at which one feels comfortable when talking to or being next to that other person, as in “you are invading my personal space.” I think the idea is much broader than that, more significant than just the distance people ought to keep from me.

Personal space for me is about safety, and the ability to step out of myself and into another Space. So was Nelson Mandela, who used his 27 years of personal space in prison to think about freedom and reconciliation.

Remember those moments in a Presidential debate in 2016 when Donald  Trump entered Hilary Clinton’s “personal space” and unnerved her so dramatically you could almost hear her teeth chatter? Personal space matter to people.

I don’t like it when people get too close to me or in my face when I talk, and I feel in my own life the idea of the personal space has grown to include my blog, my writing and my life.

I feel my personal space is shrinking so fast it is almost invisible now, and is perhaps gone. This is my problem perhaps with the unwanted advice that rains down on me most days. Well meaning people can also do the devil’s work.

I believe that personal space is vital to the creative process.

I used to take two or three years to write my book and the only things that intruded on the space I needed to think was an occasional phone call or the need to walk my dogs. I read the news once a day, in the morning paper.

Now, the news is upon me all day, it comes in notifications and alerts, alarms and announcements, e-mails and texts, bank messages and  the warm but puzzling greetings from my new “friends” on Facebook. Amazon is the enthusiastic vampire of personal space, selling our preferences to any company that will pay, convincing us that Alexa, who can hear every word we say, is our friend because she helps us buy things quickly.

I am under pressure from every government agency I need to talk to, every company I pay a bill to get online, every pharmacy that handles a prescription, every media organization and politician in Washington to subscribe, get the app, go to our website, we care about you, be paperless, check my e-mails. So much of my life is tied up in those apps I don’t really have the luxury any longer of simply avoiding the digital world.

I need it. In recent years I’ve had more and more trouble fending off the distractions in my head while I try to write a book. The best and most natural form for me now  is my blog, I have evolved in the Darwinian sense to a different kind of writing, one I love, but doesn’t take two years of personal space.

When I need personal space to write I get up at 4 a.m. and stay up until 10 or 11 p.m.

I have disciplined myself to protect my most creative hours, from about 6 a.m. to one or two p.m. That is my space, although it is frequently invaded by ringing, buzzing, pings and gongs.

I am increasingly disinclined to avoid my messages for much of the day, like some friends insist they can do (they lie, I know them). They are no better than me.

We writers are often told we don’t need space, even by our own: “You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades,” wrote Annie Dillard. She is tough. I am not.

What if my editor is e-mailing me (he doesn’t use the phone any more)?, the bank wants to tell me my balance is too low, or a friend is undergoing some kind of surgery and needs me, or the BBC needs to reach me urgently for an interview, or I want to pay the electric bill, or Maria needs me,  her car broke down, or  a young refugee student has a $200 driving ticket?, or a Mansion resident has no clothes?

When I was researching the meaning of personal space, I came across this intriguing quote from Okey Ndibe, a Nigerian author:

“In a society where people are obsessed with personal space, dogs have come to serve as welcome, neo-human mediators of loneliness and solitude.”

I thought this was an interesting idea, how dogs might support the idea of personal space, they do surely mediate loneliness and solitude. Yet the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. There are 75 million owned dogs in America. If they really mediated loneliness and solitude, personal space might have a chance.

Perhaps Ndibe is just adding to dog’s lengthening list of spiritual, brilliant, ethereal and life-saving traits. See you on the bridge, Red.

When I stay offline, I pay for it, scores, even hundreds of messages, texts, emoticons waiting for me, alerts and notifications, special offers, promotions, warnings and false alarms,  lining up, circling my space, demanding to be seen.

The good news, I think, is that space invasions rarely make me angry any more. And I hardly ever do battle with the rude space invaders of the Internet. It really is better to do good than to fight about it.

This is a battle I never had a chance of winning, when I write about civility and boundaries online, I’m just becoming another boy with his finger in the dike, only this dike is a lot bigger.

I practice radical acceptance. What I can’t change, I respect and accept. I am not the brightest bulb in the shed.

But still…what will replace the sanctity of personal space?

Just when I need it the most, the personal space around me is shrinking (imagine poor Thoreau with a smart phone at Walden Pond). Anybody can send me a message from anywhere about anything at any time. Can I really ignore all of them all to keep the boundary around me standing?

This morning, I got a dozen  text messages from politicians offering me lunch and private meetings in exchange for donations  ($3 except there is no $3 button, just $25 and $50 and $100 and weekly, if you please.)