It was a lot like a colonoscopy. You hate it, but you feel cleaner afterward.
Yesterday was my first Wednesday offline. In fact, since I know I can’t be trusted, I avoided my computer completely. Figured I’d go deep. How would it feel? What would I learn?
The rule was that I could read the morning papers with my coffee but after that I had to shut the thing down. And I did, but I will confess that I peeked at my email several times yesterday on my Android. How can you not? You go to answer the phone or a text comes in – yeah, should I have avoided those, too? Lets not get ridiculous – and you can’t help but see the little icon that says you have email, and I just glanced real fast, without answering or anything. Okay, I did forward ONE email, but it was important.
But other than that, I stayed off the computer. I turned it off at 7. It wasn’t too difficult at first. I spent all morning in my critique group so wouldn’t have noticed any difference, but the rest of the day I felt deprived. I had to do everything offline, off-computer. It was like when your electricity goes out and you read by candlelight. I even hand-wrote a draft blog post. How ironic is that?
You know how when you meditate, you kind of hope you get a vision or something? That didn’t happen. I read a whole book, okay, not a really long one, but still. It was called It Chooses You
“…I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the Internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension…In twenty years I’d be interviewing air and water and heat just to remember they mattered.”
I think this experiment was valuable in that it unhooked me from the joy juice for a lot of hours, allowing my veins to calm down and my heart to resume its normal rhythm. Not as much fun, but soothing somehow. Like a nap. No, like a nap when you’re five, and you don’t want to take one but your mom insists. And you feel energized by it. But with more email.
Please do not ignore your gut! It is telling you something and you don't want to listen. It's yelling loud and clear. There are red flags here. Please listen!
Greetings, Arden,
Thanks for the interesting questions. Wow--it WOULD take a book to answer them all! When I got to the last sentence, I laughed out loud, cause--guess what--there IS a book, and of course we'd be delighted for you to buy it. It is 
... Can I hear an AMEN in the VN house ? (:
DON'T give up...Never..and you'd be surprise how life works...a gift of love can come from just anywhere and when you least expect.in the meantime HONOR yourself because you are indeed the BEST friend and support to yourself.I worked very hard on rel
Wonderful. It’s what usually only happens when the computer crashes, and we are forced to revisit a saner way of being.
Good for you. Hope you spent some time outdoors without an iPod for company too. It is going through a withdrawal when we stay away but so worth it! I left my laptop off after supper hour last night and it was freeing.
Renee and Happy Daze, I spent most of yesterday entertaining family from out of town so the experiment continued for even a while longer. Not a bad thing.
Interesting perspective. Made me imagine The Matrix, and us stepping through from flesh into electonic pulses of code to another dimension. Guess I have my sci fi brain on this morning.