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FOR a year now, I’ve had a little quote pinned above my desk. “Tell me,” it says, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” On a particularly joyless day, I scribbled a response: “Make lunch boxes.”
....recently I’ve felt disconnected, which is absurd because last year I received 13,506 emails, sent 432 tweets and became Facebook ‘friends’ with someone I kissed in 1989. I’m so connected that I go online the second I wake up. I’m linked in, favourited, retweeted, liked.
Trouble is, all this click-and-flick stuff isn’t nourishing me or the people I care about. .....I miss being transported by a great book, enlivened by a lengthy conversation, wearied by a long walk. I crave smiles made with mouth muscles, not emoticons. I yearn for the stillness and soft foot of nature. Late last year, sitting with my husband beside a lake in the rain, I cried. Not because I was upset, but because I’d sat still long enough to feel something.
Tech torpor, nature deficit disorder, digital ADHD - call it what you like, it’s fracturing our lives. How many couples spend their evenings on separate devices? How many babies looking up from their prams see their parents’ faces masked by an iPhone? New research shows Australians are less inclined to embrace adventure and try new things, with 80 per cent blaming technology and social networking for their inertia. Add to that the 130 million days of stockpiled annual leave and you get the sense there are a lot of people visiting life rather than living it.
So, this year, I’m going trekking in Nepal. It’s a long-held dream, conjured before children and mortgage and responsibility, and put on hold for more than a decade. I signed up before they told me it would be so cold at night I’d have to pee in a zip-lock bag, and before reading that altitude can affect co-ordination (I’m challenged at sea level).
For me, the appeal is as much nature as nurture. My screensaver is an inky blue mountain iced with snow, wild and precious. It’s time I did more than just look at it.
....recently I’ve felt disconnected, which is absurd because last year I received 13,506 emails, sent 432 tweets and became Facebook ‘friends’ with someone I kissed in 1989. I’m so connected that I go online the second I wake up. I’m linked in, favourited, retweeted, liked.
Trouble is, all this click-and-flick stuff isn’t nourishing me or the people I care about. .....I miss being transported by a great book, enlivened by a lengthy conversation, wearied by a long walk. I crave smiles made with mouth muscles, not emoticons. I yearn for the stillness and soft foot of nature. Late last year, sitting with my husband beside a lake in the rain, I cried. Not because I was upset, but because I’d sat still long enough to feel something.
Tech torpor, nature deficit disorder, digital ADHD - call it what you like, it’s fracturing our lives. How many couples spend their evenings on separate devices? How many babies looking up from their prams see their parents’ faces masked by an iPhone? New research shows Australians are less inclined to embrace adventure and try new things, with 80 per cent blaming technology and social networking for their inertia. Add to that the 130 million days of stockpiled annual leave and you get the sense there are a lot of people visiting life rather than living it.
So, this year, I’m going trekking in Nepal. It’s a long-held dream, conjured before children and mortgage and responsibility, and put on hold for more than a decade. I signed up before they told me it would be so cold at night I’d have to pee in a zip-lock bag, and before reading that altitude can affect co-ordination (I’m challenged at sea level).
For me, the appeal is as much nature as nurture. My screensaver is an inky blue mountain iced with snow, wild and precious. It’s time I did more than just look at it.
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