"I want to be in charge and I want to be present"
"I want to be in charge and I want to be present"
by Amy Nolan
By Amy Nolan
When I look back, I can trace my journey to live a more real and analog life during the insanity of Covid. I was horrified at my fellow citizens and their complacency to stay in their homes and have cocktail hours over zoom. I felt like the savage in “Brave New World” and kept pissing people off by my questions and my seeming inability to wear a mask properly or stand the requisite 6 feet away.
I quit social media at that time and have never looked back. I then came across “1,000 Hours Outside” which is a phenomenal movement aimed at getting people to have more green time than screen time. It’s quite the revelation to start tracking how much time you truly spend outside and spoiler alert—it’s not as much as you think! Increasing my time outside led me to ditch the earbuds on walks and to actually be outside with my thoughts and nothing else. Wow, no wonder our childhoods were so awesome! Reading more on getting back outside led to my discovery of Wendell Berry (how had I missed his writings all these years?!) which in turn introduced me to Front Porch Republic and then Paul Kingsnorth and then happily to the School of the Unconformed and Pilgrims in the Machine. Thankfully, these happy discoveries continue to happen almost daily.
Since starting this journey, I’ve made small, incremental changes that are surprisingly impactful. No social media means I’m not enraged at my friends. I don’t actually need to know their every, single thought on politics and they don’t need to know mine.
I don’t walk with a phone. I don’t use my computer or watch TV on Sundays and it is by far the best day of my week. I’m more in tune with silence than ever before and now make it a habit to drive in silence as often as I can.
I keep a book of short stories in my car at all times so I’m not tempted to start scrolling on my phone and loose precious moments of my day. I still do Wordle but I don’t do Spelling Bee because that is somehow like crack to me. I bought a book of NY Times Crossword puzzles to keep me off the app and also invested in several beautiful jigsaw puzzles.
I’ve begun writing a list of what I need to do online and then follow that to try and curb endless surfing. The most impactful change, by far, was turning off my notification sound on my cell phone. My ringer is on (surprising how few phone calls one actually gets) but I don’t know when a text message comes in and the siren song of checking my phone every five seconds is gone.
I’m always trying to figure out new ways of changing my daily existence that will help me feel more grounded and more connected. I’m not looking to go off the grid or start a homestead, I simply want to not be owned by the machines in my life. I want to be in charge and I want to be present. I’m so happy to have found so many others who feel the same.
If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on “A Library of Unconformed Lives”.