These days, we literally have the world at our fingertips. Cell phones are no longer just for calling our friends and family, but with a push of a button we can access Facebook, twitter, the internet and a million other things. We all have GPS in our cars. We email our friends when we want to catch up. While the convenience of this is great, living without such access at our fingertips is becoming a forgotten art. As someone who was born in the 80s, I still remember a time when we did not rely on cell phones to meet up, make plans, or stay constantly up to date on news from around the world, or on GPS to tell us how to get to our destination, yet we still got there. Unfortunately, I think my generation may be one of the last that was able to do so while we were growing up.
The last time I was in Europe, I was without a cell phone for ten days, and it was a great experience. I was never digging around in my bag to see if I had a missed call, or searching the internet, or telling the people on Facebook and twitter what I was up to. Instead, I was focusing on the experience at hand, appreciating every moment and interaction so much more so. Instead of throwing directions into the GPS, I had to stop in a small village and ask a local for directions to the town we were headed to. At the time, it seemed like a nuisance, but it is a great memory, and had we had a GPS and never gotten lost in the first place, we would have never seem some beautiful sights we came across.
It pays off to unplug every once in a while. Leave your cell phone at home next time you go out for the day, and don’t go onto the internet for an entire weekend. Get lost, purposely, and see what you discover. You are bound to eventually find your way home. Instead of writing an email to a distant relative, send them a card. Handwritten notes are incredibly underrated. Memorize a phone number instead of looking it up in your phone. The purpose of unplugging is that it helps you live in the moment, and enjoy what you are doing at any given time. Making things a little difficult for yourself, like having to find your way somewhere, has endless potential to lead you to new places you have never been.
Our own parents grew up with out all of these modern conveniences, and I know that they were able to enjoy life as much, or even more, than we do today. So make a commitment to live your life, unplugged, for an hour, a day, or a week. Notice the difference, the freedom, and the realization that we are, in fact, more than capable of getting by without all the things we have been trained to rely on.
