Pages

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Day of UnPlugging

My daughter and I did another "No Technology Day" on Saturday. Well, from Friday at sundown until Saturday at sundown. We are both lovers and power users of some technologies and we've agreed to take a day a month to just not be plugged in. At first she was resistant and even put up a bit of a struggle, so we argued and I won and we lasted the whole day. This time there wasn't much struggle, plus the weather was nice and we went out and did stuff, so the time went by pretty easily. She's even planning future No Technology Days - this time we went to our trampoline school for an extra hour outside of our normal time. My daughter said, "next time we have NTD, let's do two hours of trampoline!" I did not agree to go along with that idea but who knows how I'll be feeling next time!

During the fast we have an opportunity to notice so many other things. We were getting ready for bed, reading our books and my daughter mentioned that she was having trouble reading her book because there was a song going on in her head. The song was drowning out the words on the page! We are influenced by the stuff we're ingesting all the time and we barely even notice. All the news and images and sounds. Sometimes it takes unplugging to notice the residue that we're coated in.

(We call it No Technology Day, but we don't mean no technology at all - we still have tools we use and accept phone calls, for instance - we mean the Internet and TV generally.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good idea. I think my daughter would rather I plunge flaming daggers in her eyes than take away her cell phone for a day (or even and hour), but I'm going to give it a try.

Unknown said...

It's worth a try! We allowed actual phone calls but eliminated texting, etc., so maybe there's a compromise in there somewhere!