A weekend offline
I spent last weekend somewhere with no signal. Not on purpose, exactly — the place just happened to be in a valley where the phone gave up around the last bend in the road. By the second hour I'd stopped reaching for it, and by the evening I'd half forgotten it was in my bag.
It's a small cliché to say that being unreachable is restful, so I'll only say it once: it was. What surprised me more was how much longer the days felt. With nothing to check, the gaps between things stretched out — a slow morning, a long walk, an afternoon that went nowhere in particular. I read most of a book in one sitting, which I can't remember the last time I managed.
I'm not going to turn this into a resolution. I like being online; most of what I care about lives there. But I came back with the small, obvious reminder that attention is a finite thing, and that some of the best uses of it don't involve a screen at all. I'll try to find a valley more often.
← Back home