I WAS PRESENT WITH MY FAMILY
This same weekend of my mini “Tech-Shabaat” experiment was the Saturday we had planned as a family to put up our Christmas tree. With my phone off at some distant corner, I was made to fully engage. I enjoyed dancing to Christmas music, hanging up the lights, ornaments and most important I LISTENED to my kids. I mean truly eyeball to eye ball, eardrum to eardrum truly listened to what they were saying. The path between hearing and truly listening to our kids is sometimes slippery – because they have a new adventure every five minutes or some new “move” they want to show us and we are knee deep in trying to get the dinner on the stove or worse yet trying to finish watching a cat video online. There is a way with our incessant scrolling once we are pulled away it becomes easy to “be here” but really “want to be there.”
I WAS MINDFUL WITH MY EATING
I ate when I was hungry. The in between between snacking and mindless opening and closing the fridge was at a minimum during this period; my stomach only bellowed to me when she really had not had anything for hours. I noticed how I chewed and ate my food more slower and savored the taste. What also surprised me was noticing how our kids the moment they sat down to watch TV after a few minutes all I would hear was ” I am hungry” (read as mindless eating.)
I FELT ALL MY FEELINGS DEEPLY
All the feelings. I felt them. It was a range of emotions from intense boredom to intense helplessness to intense FOMO to feelings of liberation. At the beginning it felt as though I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms of some sort – just a sense of restlessness, anxiety with no idea what to do with self, reaching for the place I usually charge my phone etc etc. Towards the end of the 24 hours I was a happier and calmer human being. I was laughing off things that would have otherwise irritated me in my usual state of being constantly “on.” We need to rest our fight or flight systems yall – we are wired!
I COMPLETED READING A BOOK
There is a book I started and completed a little after my 24 hour window. I cannot recommend enough Wintering by Katherine May. If there is a book I can describe as beautiful it is this one. Katherine gives us as humanity permission to surrender to moments in life that are hard. Lean into these moments. If you are stumbling along these short dark days as winter is approaching; wondering how you will make it through the next couple of months – this is the book you need. If you are going through a difficult season of your life – whether grief, loss or recalibrating your life for the New Year, this is the book you need.
I BEGUN TO NOTICE EVERYONE ELSES TECH USE
For some reason I begun feeling irked and started asking randomly in my head to anyone – what are we all looking at on our phones
THE WORLD DID NOT BURN DOWN WHILE I WAS AWAY
Yup. I picked up the madness from right where I left it after my tech-shabaat. The pulse from the online world beckoned me back. The noise was still the same – started off a few decibels low as I slowly trudged back and after a few hours being back online the noise became louder, faster as I begun to feel my heart rate ramp back up again.
I am definitely looking to do it over and over again. There is just a silent rebellion to turning off the blue lights for 24hours. Its humanities way of telling Big Tech not today. Not today.