going dark . . .

It’s funny that we have a phrase for this.

That “going dark” can be seen in so many different lights.

(I make puns as if it were my job. Even when it’s not my job.)

When I was planning for our trip to Colorado and Utah, I was talking with my Travelers Rest Here Intern/IG Diva/Really Gigantic Helper about what she would be doing while I was gone. I told her I would be completely off the grid for a while. She suggested I write a post when I returned called “going dark”.

I’m taking her advice.

Going Dark.

For some it sounds like a dream. Shutting it all down and becoming invisible.

For some it sounds silly.  Why bother?

For some it sounds like an impossible personal challenge.

For some it’s routine and revered.

For me, for the time that it lasted, it was an actual gift.

For one solid week, I disconnected from All Things Internet.

I said, “No. I cannot be reached.  I am unreachable.”

If you wanted to talk to me that week you had to literally be in front of me.

If I could see your eyeballs, we could have a conversation.

I’m all for that – that exchange of eye to eye, face to face, back and forth.

It’s the real life I deeply prefer.

It’s the actual, in real time, responding to your expressions with my expressions that I am after.

This Going Dark thing?

The always surprising duality is that it’s both more difficult and much easier than I expect.

Every time.

On one hand, it’s more rip off the band aid difficult than I would care to admit.

I find myself reaching for my phone to share a funny moment or a cute picture. The internet – and social media – have both become legitimate ways that I connect with people. And there’s the double edged sword in that for each of us. We know the sting, right?

I end up feeling angry at me.  Angry at my sense of dependence on both affirmation from others and on connection through a tiny screen. I don’t like it.

But. Also. Putting the phone on airplane mode and knowing that it will ask nothing of me for an entire week is the most glorious sense of freedom I can imagine. I feel exactly where I am with no expectations of spinning anything in any direction. Just the very real and satisfying sense of being alive in my own skin. Of being precisely and ONLY directly where my feet are planted and where my eyes are pointed.

I love it. I want it always.

I’m reminded of the ways I have gotten out of balance. Of the healthy rhythms I once had in place but have somehow misplaced. How Sunday No Screen Days have shifted a tad and how I need those to come into alignment again. 

I’m reminded of a simple guideline I read somewhere, heard in a podcast, had a friend tell me – a rhythm of no phone one hour every day, one day every week, one week every year.

I can get behind that.

That actually sounds pretty simple and pretty life-giving.

A mini scheduled Going Dark that is a part of being balanced, healthy and keeping all the tools in my life in perspective. Because that’s what the phone is – it’s a tool and it isn’t evil. I’m a mess and I can mess up good things and I can elevate bad things. But I can also learn to use the tools I have, to give proper order and proper place to these tools. To be healthy and to guide the people I love into health in the same manner.

Going Dark. 

Like so many things, there’s a right time and a right place for putting down the phone, for sliding it over to airplane mode, for disconnecting and going dark.

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