Disconnecting to Connect

It is mighty hard to escape the internet. For me anyway. I am a bona fide, non-apologetic, drank-the-Kool-Aid “interweb” junkie.

So when I am forced to forgo internet access, I get spleeny. Like someone has taken away my favorite toy.

I find compensation since I have to. Without electronic entertainment, I have to devise my own. Without the illusion of connection to “everywhere, everything, all at once,” some familiar old friends come into play.

Imagination for example. I sit in my living room devising scenarios about how to alter it, improve it, change it more to my liking, or, most aptly put, make it more like me and my taste.

Much as I experience when sitting down to write this daily blog, disconnection from external stimulants allows me the luxury of enjoying my own internal dictates. My own thoughts.

I love to read, for example. I am thrilled by the right books and happily transported to worlds other than my own, filled with characters facing challenges I never hope to encounter.

Reading deepens my compassion for the human condition without the messy and distracting emotional work involved in real-life people dramas. To that end, reading is also finite. People dramas – as we who are raised in less-than-ideal families know – can last indefinitely. Or they can repeat predictably and tiresomely for years.

In good books, the protagonists are forced to deal with whatever situation it is that they were flung into. What would be the point of the book otherwise? For those who well know the classic, if now formulaic, Hero’s Journey, there is an identifiable story throughline in these books.

The hero is born and separated by the fates from all that is familiar. S/he prepares for and meets challenges. S/he is close to being completely undone by the magnitude of the challenges but s/he perseveres. S/he emerges, in the end, changed and triumphant by the growth experiences s/he has had.

So the current challenge this “hero” (i.e. me, if we rightfully assume we are the heroes of our own journeys), is battling a dead internet. Fortunately, like other heroes, I am forced to draw upon previously untapped internal resources to rise to the occasion and surmount the problem.

I have prepared this blog in MS Word. I will soon head out looking for alternate internet sources: the library, Starbucks, or most reliably, McDonald’s. All the while riding the telephone and Xfinity gods for a quick and speedy resolution to this grievous inconvenience.

Which, if I’m honest, isn’t all that inconvenient. I am rather enjoying the disconnection and downtime away from the incessant demands of the internet, email, and plowing through unwanted sales pitches.

Maybe I won’t dog those nice people at Xfinity too fiercely, after all. Maybe this temporary disconnection is a blessing in disguise. Heading over to my reading chair to see what might suit me to fill in the deliciously disconnected mental space.