This is probably the soundest advice I’ve taken in the last decade.  In a matter of a few weeks I have started a journal, started this weblog, and have written several letters.  More writing for personal reasons than I have done in, well, a decade (Note: I write plenty for work related reasons, it’s not the same).

Where the time goes I’m not sure but the days are too short for mindless surfing.  I was just reading in “Small Wonders” a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver, her arguments for not having a TV – she calls it a one eyed monster.  She asks her teenage daughter, the proponent for the tube, just when she would have time to watch it.  Turns out her life is plenty busy without a TV, where would she find the time for TV?  Well, I have to say that I really didn’t have time for the internet.  I can get around just fine in cyberspace as a result of the time I’ve spent, but my time is better spent writing.

Also to my point above I actually have time to read Barbara Kingsolver.  Surfing cut into that precious reading time.  Now I can read in the evenings.  Reading is surprisingly efficient and commercial free.  No pop-ups!  Reading has led me to a couple of interesting web sites.  I’ve gone there, they are cool and thanks to them I know a little bit about community sustained agriculture and farmers markets.  But I’m back in the other room now, writing on an old notebook that (get this) does not even connect to the internet.  I’ll get a book or 2 about these subjects.  Like TV the internet is a pretty scant source of information.

It’s not exactly surfing but I loved to spend my Friday nights invading France with my favorite video game, but really, that job has been better handled through the ages by the Vikings, the English and the Germans.  They’ve pretty thoroughly trampled the real France over.  This writing thing has a little more satisfaction and is way more relaxing.  It kind of sets a person on edge trading infantry for real estate on the beach at Normandy .  I get all wound up and the outcome is rather predictable after all that excitement.  I can write about invading France and it’s relieving.  To actually do it picks that tension back up.  Good news, my laptop can’t connect from here, so France is safe now.

At what point did technology run away with us?  When did it become necessary have to make a decision not to watch TV, surf the internet or play video games?  I wish I had a good answer.  I hike into the back country on foot and forsake the automobile as often as I can.  I canoe or kayak to avoid that interminable tie to the internal combustion engine that seems to try to use us rather than the other way around.  We need to start to rethink some things.  Get back our abilities as people.  We need to stop letting technology run our lives and make our choices for us.  We need to quit surfing the internet and write.