Several people from work looked forward to their sabbaticals to completely unplug from technology: no computer, no internet. I didn’t vow to do anything of the sort on my sabbatical, but it occurred to me the other day that I frequently go whole days without opening my laptop. I still use my phone to communicate with friends and family, for internet searches, and to ask AI to do stuff for me, like make swim workouts, but I’m not on social media anymore, so my screen usage is a fraction of what it is when I work.
My eyes are grateful for it — they need the rest. Just as welcome, I feel present in the world and connected to it. Rather than only watching birds for a few minutes at the feeder, I watch for long stretches of time. They’re funny little creatures. They chase, they chirp, they dart, swoop, strut, and preen. I watch them hide in the leaf-heavy branches and move among the trees. They’re very busy at being alive. A crow hopped around the driveway the other morning, chasing after two bunnies, chattering at them, “Hey guys! Play with me!” They ignored him. The squirrels are funny, too. They raid the feeder, of course, and I love to open the sliding glass door and watch them freak out that I’m so close. The feeder hangs from the back deck on the second floor, and they leap from the deck rail to the nearest tree branch, arms spread like they’re leaping for their lives, land on the flimsy branch that bends cartoonishly low under their weight, and scramble up to surer stability with their tiny squirrel hearts racing. This little spectacle is such a delight, I don’t mind feeding them along with the birds.
I also get out of the house a lot more, now that I’m not fully concentrated on my screen all day. Yesterday, I went to our small downtown after lunch for a coffee. I took my notebook with me. I write a lot in notebooks. Maybe a couple thousand words a day, with my pretty pens and pretty ink and smooth paper. Not about anything in particular, just writing to write because I like the feel of it.
Without a laptop, I don’t need to carry a backpack when I go places; instead I carry my new tote with a notebook and pens. Yesterday I sat in the café and sipped foamy coffee, wrote my surroundings, and felt the difference between now, when graduations are done and town has emptied and 85% of the café’s tables were vacant, and two weeks ago when the line snaked out the door.
I had errands to run downtown. In my normal life, I would have driven from the coffee shop, which is on one end of downtown, to the book store, which is on the other. But this is a very small town. It’s only a 15 minute walk between the two. If I’d been traveling to a new city, I wouldn’t have even considered driving. So I treated home as if I were traveling, and I walked. I walked one block over from Main Street so I could walk past pretty residential gardens, listen to the birds, investigate berries, feel the air, and smell flowers. I walked to the co-op to buy cashews and poppy seeds for my overnight oats, to the art store to buy notebooks to take to Europe, to the dentist to pay a bill, and to the book store to pick up a book I’d ordered.
I’d been feeling the itch to blog again, so I opened my laptop today. Now the sun is up, though, and the wind is rustling the trees. The sky is blue with fluffy white clouds, and there seems to be some sort of bird convention in the front yard. There’s a lot of squawking going on. I have my computer glasses on so I can’t see them to see what kind they are. Maybe robins. It’s time for me to shut up shop and see what’s happening.
Butterfly Mind 