It’s only ten days into our Blue Hill summer delirium, but already, my suspicions have been confirmed. The Internet is ruining my life. Or at least is the force that slowly masticates, swishes around and forcibly swallows all of that free time that I am supposed to have since we don’t watch television.
I am always both tempted and repelled by the genre of self-help books with titles such as “Habits of Highly Effective People” mostly because I used to be effective and am loath to admit that I am no longer am, and my habits are not going to be extolled in any of these books sold at Kinkos and JFK. If I wasn’t always effective, I was at least efficient in certain ways at a younger point in my life. Stuff got done. I had lengthy, multi-faceted to-do lists that I would lay there slain at the end of each day. I could read and go for a run and spend time with friends while doing my job, be it a full-time student or a development assistant. Yes, this was before the days of Arden Penelope. But I think Arden Penelope is getting a bad rap. I think it’s the internet’s fault, man.
I didn’t have the internet in high school when I was accomplishing plenty of [silly] things. Nor did I have the internet in college (well, there was proto-email available in the basement of Firestone Library, and nascent surfing through Alta Vista etc., but I only used it for figuring out train schedules.). It’s only in my adult life that I feel generally overwhelmed and behind, and only in my adult life that I spend a great deal of time with my laptop, airport turned on, ready to distract and amuse and inform and facilitate and on and on and on. Perhaps someday my grandchildren will look at photos of me in my late 20s and early 30s, and mock me for the perma-present gigantic white slab on my lap. How archaic! And how responsible it might be for my lack of effectiveness!
In our Portland lives, (call it our city lives, small though Portland may be…) I bemoan how late we go to bed, how few books I read, how short the days seem to be. Here in the woods in Blue Hill, a stone’s toss to Morgan Bay, without the temptation to stare, overwhelmed, at my overflowing inbox of email, without the access to pertinent state of the world updates of NYT homepage (for better or worse), without the idea of strolling through the sale items on anthropologie.com, or zooming around on zillow trying to spy on my dream house, or looking at the up-to-the moment musings of my closest 500 friends facebook, I am on supposedly on vacation. Yet I am more effective.
Sure, there are other variables to disclose besides my un-wired status. This adorable little cottage is not my house. Unfortunately. But it means that I am not tempted to clean it. It’s not my stuff to organize or rearrange. We don’t even have laundry. All I can do to the house is cook in it, and if I’m feeling very generous, clean up after myself. I can’t get lost in organizing or addressing the piles of physical mail and all of the Williams Sonoma catalogues therein. And there is no way for me to accidentally run errands here, like I sometimes do in Portland. Any shopping here is deliberate, and the result of effort and mileage. And I believe that physical barriers to inadvertent shopping are a good way of preventing the collection of needless crap. (If you don’t know it’s out there, you won’t covet it.) I am passing no windows nor billboards, and I want for nothing. Since the internet is one big mall, the removal of that variable only further proves my point!
Here, I am watching an episode (minimum) of the Wire per night. I am reading books and not falling asleep after six pages. I am frequently in bed by 10:30. When Arden wakes up at dawn, though I still try to con her into believing it’s the middle of the night, I know that I can actually survive the morning because I’ve gotten at least six hours of sleep. “It can be like this!” I say to myself. Why is it that in our city lives, the days disappear like cool whip? Is it that I’m hitting the gym or going to yoga? Nope. Not that. Is it that I’m sucked into hours of episodic television? Not that either. It’s the world wide webs I tell you! Which brings me to the obvious question: if I can live without it, or if life is improved through its absence, or at least a more draconian limitation, why does it seem so radical to imagine turning on my wireless for a only a few hours per day? What am I so afraid of missing?
Would Thoreau have had wifi in his Simplified life? Maybe. It sure makes things easy. It’s hard to argue with online bill-pay. But though the world wide web brings the world swirling through your door, it can obscure, or distract from what is actually present. Here and now, on the other side of my door, is a still bay, some crickets, a light breeze in the trees, and as soon as I stop typing, a whole lot of silence. It’s 10:30. And instead of checking the weather forecast on accuweather.com, or perusing my netflix queue, or buying a new needed pair of tennis shoes on zappos, I’m off to read a book and try to commit to memory the face Arden made today while sitting in a kayak for the first time in Blue Hill Bay. And next time I have wireless, maybe I’ll post a picture on facebook. But what’s the rush?
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