The Unplug... and How to Get It

Hey. Hello. I missed you! Let's talk... about... well, eventually Florence, and many more things but right now let's just talk about i n t e r n e t. A navelgaze, so after the jump we go!

Florence: A NICE PLACE, if you can even believe such a wildly accusatory statement. More on this... in the future!

First things first: the internet is great! It's this magical thing whereby I can be on the other side of an ocean and still know how my friends' days are going, apply to jobs from thousands of miles away, pull up music if I've got a song stuck in my head, or figure out where on earth I am and how to get home from wherever that is.

But it is also a trap, or it can be. This weekend I decided to purposefully unplug, to de-tech myself (well, almost) and take two or three days with just google maps (when absolutely necessary) and my Nook (gots to read!). (Oh, and my dumb camera, because I find I still like tinkering with that.) So no Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, but also no browser, email, texting, nothin'. Just being in the world.

It was a pretty great exercise! For one thing, it helped reset my tempo. I hadn't realized how much my phone especially had trained me for that weird 21st-century pace of "OK but NOW what it's been literally SECONDS since the last bit of stimulation." And it was really nice to step away from that, just as it was really nice to step away from posting things, or seeing who had interacted with posts, and so on. (All things that I didn't used to wrassle with, weirdly, as active as I've always been online - it's only in the past few years that I've learned to take value from that stuff, about which, if I may wax poetic: BARF.)

So yes, head-clearing, life-tempo resetting, world-awakening-to, all those things which are grand. But the other thing that was interesting, as time went by, was the realization that I'd been using all the noise of the internet (RSS feeds, Pocket reader, podcasts, Twinstabook [sorry, I'm trying to have this removed], my regular sites) as a kind of belay cable to pull me up short from dwelling too much with my thoughts. Again: not something I used to do, but a habit that accumulated over time, specifically during my depressive period a couple years back.

What I wasn't expecting was that, while there definitely were some little wafts of sadness/stress/grumbling rattling around in those moments when I'd usually have gone to distract myself via bitmoji/giffing/emojiing, it mostly felt great not to have that escape valve. I have always liked having time to wander around my thoughts and feelings in quiet moments, turns out, and while there are little bumps to get over - kind of like getting back in the water after a long time away, that brief moment of "oh wait how's this go again?" - it feels really good to be taking that time and re-learning the part of me that loves quiet, that can take an afternoon of reading and puttering and have that be that.

In any case, it's a luxury that I let myself take for having finished my latest chapter and arrived in Florence, and it's one that I can't indulge in most days as dissertation and job hunt continue, but I'm going to be tweaking some personal habits. Instagram will probably stick around, because I'm finding photography a really fun way of keeping an active eye in the world, but I'm hoping to ease back in other social media areas, and to really keep my computer/phone use purposeful. Turning off all my notifications (text/email/everything) really helped me realize how much they'd made me feel kinda jittery, a slave to the tempo of technology, and I want to get back to that place of choosing when I dip in, and being careful that that decision isn't just "I'm feeling antsy and would like a distraction."

And really, there could hardly be a better place to work this all out. Italian culture is so social (more on that soon), so out-of-doors, and so face-to-face (at least as I'm experiencing it) that it tremendously rewards tucking things away and staying in the moment. And as I settle into Florence, I'm finding it to forget even about the maps, and just to let sense memory take hold and just be in the world, simple, alive, and fresh. Feels good.

Up next: more on Florence! Take two, and all the sweeter for being the second time around...