“deliberately,” to “simplify, simplify” and thus enrich his life. I was basically Henry David Thoreau living in the twenty-first century. (Mrs. Smith, my dear tenth-grade English teacher, if you are reading this, please forgive me for comparing myself to Thoreau. I know I have no right.)
Confession (sorry again, Mrs. Smith): I hadn’t read a full book in a really long time—not including Twilight , which I had to read when I covered the Twilight trilogy at MTV. Even when I was reading that lighter fare, I was still easily distracted by whatever was around me. In fact, one of the most tangible changes in my life due to my addiction and increasingly distracted nature is that my attention span is shot. I am basically incapable of reading a single article in the newspaper or a chapter of a book in a single sitting.
One of my favorite weekend activities used to be lounging around and reading the New York Times and Wall Street Journal front to back. My dad and I used to sit in the living room, read a paper each, then switch and read the other. Now, we sit down with our reading (usually via the app on our iPads) and within twenty minutes we’re playing online Hearts via Bluetooth. These days, when I try to read, I generallyget through the first line of each paragraph before my eyes start to skim and my fingers reflexively turn the page. I interrupt my “reading” every few minutes to check my iPhone. I usually make it through one or two articles but give up because I realize I’m not retaining anything. Sometimes I’ll manage to get through an entire article but realize I absorbed absolutely nothing because I spent the entire time thinking about the person who wasn’t texting me back . . . or how to respond to the person who was. If you’re anything like me, your eyes probably glazed over midway through this last paragraph. In fact, you’re probably texting right now, aren’t you? That’s okay. I totally get it.
Needless to say, at first it was difficult for me to focus on Walden . I had to read paragraphs over and over, because my mind was stuck in this rut: I have to check my phone . But after, once the phantom iPhone limb started to haunt me less frequently, I adjusted, and slowly but surely my attention span and focus came back. Suddenly, I was absorbing everything. And what’s more, I was enjoying it. Thoreau’s transcendentalist journey brought him self-reliance and self-sufficiency. He did not have to see company or hear a phone beep to feel confident or secure. He wrote:
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, andpublish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Those lines played over in my mind, even though the phrase “cut a broad swath” has always inexplicably made me cringe. On one level, I’d embarked on the experiment as a way to show my friends and family that I could do without my obsessive connection. But on a deeper level, I wanted to understand life on my terms again, to feel my feelings, whether positive or excruciatingly negative, and I wanted my time back, all the hours that I spent texting or Facebooking or tweeting. I wanted to get this experiment right so that afterward, in the coming weeks, months, and years, for the rest of my life, I would be able to see life in its raw form and so learn to live my life with less interruption and more deliberateness. But once I got into the thick of the experiment and I felt so alone and panicky, I started to get pretty bearish on the whole thing. Thoreau seemed to be better at this than me.
And then something changed . . .
It happened around day four.