I am out of my element today. I’m up in the mountains, stranded (so it seems) with no Wi-Fi and bad cellphone service. I feel a nagging sense of anxiety at not being able to complete whatever technological task comes to mind, like paying bills, randomly searching online, or publishing this post. I recognize that it’s actually put me in a state of frenzied standstill—what do I do now?? It’s amazing how your reliance on something is exposed the moment it’s taken away from you.
I am reminded of a similar story my dad told me several months ago when his laptop stopped working. Now, my dad is a pretty technologically savvy person; he knows his way around a computer and is pretty crafty with the Internet and Google Earth. Even so, I would never have pinned him as someone who needed a computer. I’ve always thought of him as a kind of mountain man, capable of living off the land and content to sit for hours reading a good book or simply reflecting on life. He’s an archeologist, and the time we spent with him growing up was mostly spent outdoors, camping in the woods. Besides the camping trips, I mostly remember him doing mountain mannish things like sucking the blood from my hand after I'd been pierced by a cactus; killing a rattle snake and wrapping its dried skin around his hat for decoration; and spending days in the desert with his group of friends he called the Wild Bunch. So, as you can see, this image of him was forged in my mind long ago.
Anyway, I think both of us got a dose of reality when his laptop crashed. He told me that he didn’t think much of it—at buy viagra online sildenafil first. But then he found himself missing it. More than missing it, he was craving it. He never realized it before, but having that laptop always nearby, with its access to an endless source of information at his fingertips, had become a very important part of his day. Its absence was tangible. He said that he felt like he was going through a sort of withdrawal.
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How had this happened? He was a man of science and nature, not some techy incessantly plugged into the Web. Except that he had been plugged in. Now that he’d been forcefully unplugged, it felt like he was coming out of a fog. He realized that all that time spent online had swallowed up the time he used to spend doing things he loved: reading, going for walks, or simply getting outside. In the end, he was grateful for the wakeup call, and after a month or two, the laptop remained closed on his desk, unrepaired and, frankly, warily avoided. He would fix it eventually, but he decided he liked knowing he was capable of getting by without it.
As for me, stranded up here on a mountain of radio silence, we’re also having to function without any hot water or clothes dryer. Talk about getting back to the basics. But it’s good, I think. It’s not easy, certainly not, and there will undoubtedly be a level of discomfort to work through. But there was a time when we knew how to cope without these luxuries, when we weren’t thrust into a state of fear and anxiety at their absence. We’ve simply forgotten. So I know we’ll get by, and in the end, we just might find ourselves a little more capable than we thought.
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