NATERNET

Peace and Quiet

Try thinking of a time and place where you were completely disentangled from everything but yourself and the natural world around you. I’m talking about having no cell phone nearby, no laptop, no television, no iPad, no headphones, nothing. 

I can’t think of a time recently when I could check off each of those criteria and say that I was truly on my own. Sure, there are plenty of times when I get away from television, put away my laptop and take off my headphones, but I still have my iPhone in my pocket, at the ready, just in case I think of something to Tweet or want to distract myself. I can think of times when I haven’t had my phone on me, but I’ve been sitting in front of my laptop, or have been watching TV, or have been out to see a movie. But an instance when I’ve had no piece of technology readily available to satiate my need to be connected? I’m almost drawing a blank for at least the past five or so years. It’s amazing how quickly and irrevocably things can change like that. 

I relished the silence when I was growing up. I’d climb up into tree houses (yes, I had multiple tree houses, as well as various forts in the woods surrounding my house, jealous?) with a book and just read for hours uninterrupted, with only the sounds of birds, the wind blowing through the trees, and the occasional sound of a tractor off in the distance.

We had five acres of trees and lawn and garden, and outside of that was farmland as far as the eye could see. The highway was 1/2 mile away and it wasn’t a busy one. When people were coming to visit, I used to be able to sit outside and listen for approaching cars or if it was nighttime, I could watch for headlights from miles away, anticipating that it might be our impending visitor, and it usually was. We had neighbors, but they were all at least 1/2 mile or more away. The only house within walking distance was my grandmother’s. That was just the way it was. 

On warm summer days or crisp fall afternoons, I’d lay down on the grass and look up at the sky and let my mind wander. 

As I got older and technology became more and more prevalent, I would let it intrude on these moments. Instead of sitting in a treehouse reading a book, I’d sit in a treehouse listening to a new tape on my Walkman. Instead of laying on the grass looking up at the sky, I’d be in my room playing Nintendo or watching TV. When I mowed the lawn, I would attempt to crank my headphones up loud enough to be heard over the sound of the motor. It was more or less unsuccessful, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t try. It’s a wonder I’m not deaf already.

I still consider myself extremely lucky to have grown up without many of the distractions that fill our lives today. Even for the times, there were distractions that I was shielded from. I didn’t grow up in the city, we didn’t get cable TV until I was in high school, and I didn’t have regular access to a computer until I went to college. Not having those things gave me a perspective that I really cherish. Even though my life is hyper-connected; with my iPhone, iPad, laptop, TV, Netflix, and whatever else, I still enjoy the silence that life has to offer. I don’t engage in it nearly enough these days. But I get most of the way there as much as I can. 

I love biking to work and around town, but I almost always have headphones on, listening to audiobooks or podcasts or music.

I have a large enough yard to allow for time spent doing yardwork, but again I usually have my headphones on. 

The closest I get to completely away from technology is when we go for hikes or walks in the park, but even then I have my phone on me- in case of emergencies on hikes and “just because” on walks in the park. So even when I’m not using technology, it’s always at the ready.

I  admit that I feel weird when I don’t have my phone on my person. To think that only 15 years ago I didn’t have a cell phone or a computer and got along perfectly fine is rather remarkable. I can’t imagine getting through life without either today, and even cell phones are essentially tiny pocket computers, anyway. I can do most of the things I do on my laptop on my mobile, if I really want to. 

All of this contributes to an odd dichotomy when I look back at my life.

For example: my first bank account came with a balance book, an actual little book I had to bring into the bank every time I wanted to take money out or put money into my account. The teller would take the book, subtract or add to the balance by hand, and then give the book back to me. Now, I can pull out my phone, tap on my credit union’s app and have complete access to my bank accounts wherever I happen to be.

I often feel like I grew up not in the 1980s and 90s, but in the 50s and 60s, when compared with the way I interact with the world today. Part of that can of course be attributed to growing up in a rural area. But it’s not like we were completely unaware of the emerging technology all around us, like a bunch of backcountry rubes or something. I had computer classes in elementary school, my high school was the first in the area to have it’s own T1 line, and most of my friends and relatives had cable TV. My parents had a cellphone by the early to mid 90s, even if it was only to be used for emergencies, like if we got stuck in a snowstorm or got a flat tire somewhere. But the distance between then and now is so startling, when I sit back and really think about it, that it almost defies comprehension. 

The first time I had information at my fingertips was when my parents started buying a set of encyclopedias one at the grocery store each month. I recall being so excited as I flipped through the pages with all of that knowledge right there, waiting for me to look it up. Now, if I want to know something, I can literally ask my phone and it will look it up for me. Go figure. 

This is what makes part of me feel like an old man, while the other part of me is zipping along, up to date on every little bit of technology- When I tried looking up references to people buying sets of encyclopedias at the grocery store like my parents did, the first result that matched came from someone relating a story from 1942. 1942! Other references I found came from the 1970s. Stuff like that is why I feel old. Of course, I was just able to look that up by simply typing “grocery store encyclopedias” into Google, then follow the thread down to the encyclopedia maker Funk and Wagnalls, and so on. so it’s not like I’m that old and incapable. I know how to search the internets. Such is the life of someone straddling Generation X and the Millennial Generation, I guess. Never completely at home with technology, but extremely well-versed in how it’s used, we’re just old enough to remember what was, quite literally, a simpler time. 

One of my favorite things to do when I was in high school and I was driving back home at night from a date or some school-related event was to stop in the middle of the empty highway, turn off my car, turn off my headlights, get out, and just stand there. I wouldn’t do anything, I wouldn’t say anything, I would just look up at the sky and listen to the world as it was. The crickets in the ditch, the wind through the grass, a faraway engine, and the silence. That silence could sometimes be deafening and almost too much to take, like the world itself was too much to take in all at once. When that would happen, I would jump back in my car and crank up the stereo for the rest of the drive home, just to counter it. But I loved that feeling of being overwhelmed by the vastness of the quiet. It would sometimes bring a tear to my eye if I stood there too long, because it was just so much. 

I really do think that our brains and our souls need that bit of solitude every now and then. We need to unplug, tune out, and just get off the grid from time to time. Decompress, as my wife likes to say. It doesn’t matter how you do it, whether you go out into the woods and meditate, hop in a boat and go out into the middle of a lake or river, go for a motorcycle ride on a hot summer day, or hike up a mountain and lay on top of it in silence. That sort of freedom beckons to us, even if we don’t always listen.