My Electromagnetic Fast

My Electromagnetic Fast

Living without my Internet & Cell Phone for 5 days in the woods

It’s snowing – again – as I put my pen to paper. Writing with a pen feels so very strange as I haven’t done a full page that way for years. You see, just as the Winter returned with a vengeance to Quebec my wife and I decided to take a retreat from the frenetic busyness of the world – and its [mostly] bad news about the war in Iran. We chose to do an experiment by not only being physically isolated at our northern cottage but more importantly by disconnecting from the electromagnetic world of internet and cell phone. I must admit – I could not imagine how odd it felt to not check my cell for my daily news feed. I could not imagine how naked I felt – naked in that I felt as if a layer of reality that had been covering the real me was removed. Without my “2 electromagnetic friends” I was alone and the real me was revealed – the good, bad and the ugly.

Have you every tried to disconnect from internet & cell recently? Well, if you do, I’m warning you that it is very disconcerting in 2 ways. First, I did not realize how much I was connected to others via my “2 friends” in a GOOD way. No enjoyable zoom events. No more excellent movies I had found on You Tube. No more texts with my daughters in BC. No long chats with my brother in Manitoba. But there is another dark side to my “2 friends” which I discovered – I was addicted to them in a bad way. I became aware of how my virtual world was over running my real world. I realized that my virtual connections were taking up more time and energy than my real, physical ones. The honest truth is that I felt adrift on the ocean of Life on a raft with no paddle and no sail because my “2 friends” had been doing all the paddling for me. In effect, my life rotated around them instead of around my being. It’s had to describe but the feeling was over-overwhelmingly real and not in a good way – I was clearly an addict. There was a big hole in my life that only the electromagnetic world had filled instead of the real world. I now realize that the virtual world had started to take over my real world.

Normally as I get up in the morning I scan the daily weather report but now I realize that all I have to do is look out the window to check out the weather. Then I would scan headlines from Google news but now I realize that most [but not all!] news was something I could nothing about and only made me feel helpless and pathetic. Of course there are good things missed too, like my morning daily prayer zoom calls with folks from across North America whose presence is healing and my weekly Franciscan zoom group who also focus on all the ways in which we can be grateful for the good things in life and always focus on helping each other and all our neighbours [neighbours includes are non-human friends]. It should not be so hard, being that I am old enough to remember the pre-internet and pre-cell phone days. I should not be surprised at how different life is without my “2 friends”…. but I am. I am shocked by how life has slowed down and changed my focus much more on the immediate and the present and how much I must find ways to entertain myself without my 2 electromagnetic baby sitters.

We all know how many parents use TV or computer games to babysit their children. We all know how terrible this is for their healthy development. What I now wonder is this: do our “2 friends” have the potential to be equally negative to our development as adults? Does our over reliance on the often positive connections that our “2 friends’ provide have a dark side that is retarding our development as it does for young children? In particular, I am thinking of the sense that we feel more helpless because of them. We feel more over whelmed because of them. We engage less with real reality and more with virtual reality – thinking it is real – because of them. I don’t know if this is true – but that is certainly how I felt – because my learning over these 5 days has not been intellectual – but rather visceral: experiential and emotional and not fully conscious. I am shocked at how much slower life is; how odd it feels to entertain myself with a book instead of a movie; I am surprised by how much I miss grabbing my phone and calling my sister in Australia on WhattsApp or texting or emailing a friend or finding an interesting article to read on one of my favourite blogs.

As for the war in Iran – what war? The only war that matters up here is the war between winter and spring – and winter is winning. I just went for the most gorgeous XC ski with the tree branches all covered in powdery snow that made me feel like I was in fairy land. Of course, this is a day after 24 hours of pouring rain that turned the surface of the frozen lake into a watery, slushy mess – yes, it’s a war – but a natural struggle that brings life – unlike the nastiness happening now in the Middle East and Ukraine that only brings death. So now instead of hearing the latest tale of death I watch the deer who live around our cottage in the winter [to be safe from the wolves who descend from the north for the winter months]. There are 7 of them and they are now happily munching on a spruce tree that fell only 2 feet from our parked car – yes, that was the drama of the small world up here – a drama of a human scale, drama that does not over whelm of make me feel helpless. Instead, I am grateful that my car was not smashed to bits by the tree and happy for the deer who have many happy meals ahead.

When I watch the deer I wonder what it would be like to live as totally in the NOW as they do and to be totally part of the natural world around them – unlike me, in my heated home with wonderful fresh water from a deep well and electricity from James Bay to keep me in my creature comforts. Watching them sleep happily on the ground last night when it was -23 C made me realize that my body was not built for this ecosystem and that I truly am a creature of the Savannah. The deer appear content but am I ever truly content? Are you? It’s easy for the deer: they have no alternative to just accepting each day as it comes and to just make the best of it. It’s hard for us, but I still believe we should be a bit more like the deer and stop living so much in our abstractions that the electromagnetic world provides for us. Perhaps we can be like the deer in this way: they are part of the woods, they are in synch with the seasons – I think we could do that. I watch them together eating during a long day of pouring rain followed by -15 C accompanied by snow and howling winds… the world turns to ice and the snow sticks to everything and it is gorgeous in its icy and seemingly deadly splendour… but they never complain. They never will: they just are.

When I look outside my window I see a beautiful white fairyland. The only problem is that I am not deer so being content is much harder. I’m a man, now an old man according to my grandson who calls me “the old guy” – and I I both enjoy and benefit from – sometimes and in some ways – from the connections to friends and family and other idealistic and lovely folks around the world. But I also know that my “2 electromagnetic friends” want to hog all my time and energy and take it away from my real, physical friends and substitute virtual experiences for real one. Thus, using my “2 friends” to connect comes at a price, a very, very high price – a price I am only understanding and experiencing now that I am disconnected [well, mostly]. I feel it now, after only 3 days of being disconnected, because no I live much more in the here and in the now.

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” ~ Wendell Berry

I now clearly see that my disconnected life is qualitatively different: longer, slower, more pregnant with simple living as part of physical reality of this place, of this moment. But there is also another dimension that gave us the thought of this electromagnetic fast: our physical health. For many years the “lunatic fringe” has claimed injury from emf fields, especially from cell phone towers and from holding your cell phone against your head to chat for hours each day. With the advent of 5G and electric cars this point of view has grown to the point that in Germany 1/3 of the population is concerned about this issue. Perhaps this former “lunatic fringe” has some valid points? I am unsure, but I do know from other life experiences that everything good has its trade offs and all technology has impacts we never thought about when we first began using it. For example, the big cities of Europe and the USA were clogged with horse shit just before the advent of the gasoline powered cars and were so happy to get rid of their disastrous horse shit problem – without ever once considering that the CO2 & NOx’s from the tailpipe of this marvelous new technology would one day change the Earth’s climate.

I think once I return to our electromagnetic jungle I will be a bit more circumspect with my use of my “2 friends” and turn them off when I am not using them. Perhaps I will see if having a wired rotor instead of a wireless rotor makes sense. Perhaps when I buy my next electric car I will consider where the electric motor is placed relative to my body [there is research from Europe about setting standards for emf in electric cars]. Perhaps I’ll live more like the deer at our cottage and not worry so much about the future. Maybe I’ll avoid reading the latest headlines in the war with Iran and generally avoid the addictive behaviours that remove me from my physical reality that my “2 friends” encourage. Maybe, just maybe, this electromagnetic fast will move me to consciously choose the healthy, life-giving ways that my “2 friends” enrich my life with BUT reduce all of the negative, addictive, busy, frenetic, worried and distracted aspects that my “2 friends” seem to want to impose upon me.

The good news is that I get to choose. You get to choose too. And along the way, perhaps this conscious choosing can help you save the world! Our current destructive way of life is clearly too busy – its all just too much. So, take a break. Take a breath. Pause. Breathe deeply and slowly. Save yourself before you plunge into saving the world because the reality is that the world will survive – albeit damaged – by our current madness – but you won’t. Here’s a thought: try an electromagnetic fast as I have done and see how much you want to free yourself from the shackles it locks us up with -the shackles where you just cannot live without “your 2 friends”. Additionally, and more importantly, you may discover that “your 2 friends” can, IF and ONLY IF you are very careful, really be good friends who improve your life in physical reality. They can connect you to friends and family, they can connect you to Nature and the real world ever more deeply – but be careful – this path is like walking on thin ice – it’s an amazing experience, but also very dangerous.

A final note. If you have never read Wendell Berry – the rural Kentucky poet and essayist, try to do so. He has a very funny essay on why he doesn’t use a computer and only writes with a pen or pencil. That essay was part of the inspiration for writing this little reflection with pen on paper and even now I am thinking about my electromagnetic fast and about good old Wendell as I transcribe my chicken scratch that I wrote a few days ago onto this darn computer which I both love and hate. So, try some Wendell: I recommend a recent collection of his essays entitled The World Ending Fire. Then savour the sunrise and the sunset. Love the wind and the rain. Live in the here and the now – but remember – that’s harder than you think in our weird and wired world.

                On or off? You get to choose.