Marco I wanted to do a test: disconnection for a whole day. I unplugged everything for 24 hours. Without internet, without applications, without computers, without a telephone. I want to share with you how it went and what I learned.
You can read this in italian on L’Ordinario magazine.
It might seem stupid, superfluous, insignificant, but I wanted to do it: disconnect from everything and everyone for 24 hours and tell you how it went. To do this little test, I rented a small house in the woods for the weekend, in the village of Yegnyshevka, in order to enjoy the silence and tranquility to the fullest. Hotel is called Park Otel Premyera. To double the “thrill” I went alone, without any company. Upon my arrival on Friday evening, I unplugged everything, so as to remain “disconnected” the whole day on Saturday and connected only with the special place where I was. It sounds simple, and it is. I don’t want to bore you with the usual wise talk about the absolute evil of the internet and how Big Data controls us and influences our choices. I just tell you that I wanted to understand how time flows and how the day passes without our most common distractions. Things that we “only” forgot, because, given our age (forty for a while), it is clear that I am not digital natives.
Well, here I am. I take the first discovery for granted: the day goes by anyway! For the rest, I did not plan much, I simply forced myself to disconnect the internet and not turn on the computer even for leisure. I only used the phone as a watch and nothing else.
There were temptations, it is useless to deny them.
Friday evening at twenty.
I disconnected the wifi and data connection. So I am alone in this house in the middle of the woods and I begin to think: what do I do now? Ok, I’ll play some music. No, there is no internet and I normally use an application, so I have nothing that is offline. I opt to open a bottle of wine – I am not and do not want to be a hermit in a cave without pleasure – and I sit down. Having a good book with me, I move the armchair and place it in front of the window with a view of the woods… So: feet on the radiator, a bottle of Saperavi wine – a Caucasian grape variety – and… let the night begin.
The woods at the sunrise 
The frozen river Oka 
the resin of the pine 
The blue hour
The concept of time without the connection
The first thing I notice is the passage of time, I have more. When I hang around on social media or any other pastime that can be used on my phone, time seems to fly. But it doesn’t make sense. Here, however, of this last half hour I am left with the meaning of the book I brought with me – the stories of Pushkin – and the taste in the mouth of the wine enjoyed looking out the window. In this small wooden house in the middle of the woods, the daylight is disappearing and I fully enjoy the blue hour, that is, that moment when the sun has already gone but it is not yet dark. Gradually the objects become black, the sky still has some light but not enough to illuminate things, the colors disappear and only the shapes remain. The tall spruce trees sway slightly to the rhythm of the gentle wind, have you ever heard the trees sing? Well, each plant makes a specific sound vibrating in the wind. The trunks are slender, perhaps 40 cm in diameter, and about 20 meters high.
In all of this, I just keep doing nothing. But the mind flies, travels, explores, stops in rooms of my imagination and then starts again. I’m not just standing still, this is the concept of idleness: doing nothing productive. The questions I ask myself are significant and I don’t necessarily have to have the answers, but thinking about them is already a good thing. What do I want to do in life? Not in a generic sense, but the question, for everyone, is: have I thought of something much more practical, the next steps? What do I want to keep and what do I want to leave behind? In which direction do I want to go? What are our medium and long-term goals? Questions to which it is very difficult to answer, but I need time to think about it, stop, reflect and start activating that worm that, millimeter after millimeter, will dig very long tunnels that I will transform in our lives. Do you know when a tree dies? Does the bark peel off and can you see the traces left inside by the insects? They are never straight, but they are always wonderful imperfect, fascinating works of art.
Saturday – the day of leisure
My routine upon waking up, after the alarm goes off, is to watch the news or check the various notifications. Well, on this anomalous Saturday of mine, the phone is in another room, for once I didn’t take it to sleep with me, and, among other things, I don’t need to have an alarm clock. I look out the window and it starts to dawn, which means that it is around 6:30 at this time of the year. I stretch a bit, the serious ones talk about yoga, but I don’t know much about it, maybe it will be something that I will deepen in the future. I simply allow myself a few minutes to recover from the night. Breakfast will be ready at nine: coffee, omelet, kasha (a typical Russian oatmeal) and yogurt. So I have some time to walk on the river or in the woods. I chose to have the meals prepared by the hotel in order to travel light. The snow is still abundant at the end of March and with difficulty I enter the trees. I sniff the air, put my hand in my pocket to understand where I am on the map, but … oops, I don’t have a phone. I therefore realize how I’m used to finding immediate answers and controlling everything. If I now decide to look at the map on the phone which thankfully I don’t have, I would find myself dealing with email and message notifications, which would distract me from the time and place I am in. Am I really always aware of where I am and why?
After breakfast I read for an hour and then go out again for a walk along the frozen river. When I arrive at noon I ask myself: how many things have I really done? I will have walked for four hours, read a few chapters and thought about the important questions for my life; you will have your own questions, I guess. Who doesn’t have any?
A totally disconnected day is not such a demanding thing, or rather, it is not impossible, but you have to choose to want to do it. Am I advising you to unplug everything and go back to life before the internet age? No. It is probably not even possible nowadays in our cities. Maybe yes, but why give up on comforts? Why give up keeping in touch with your friends or family, why give up video calls, why give up being able to work even from outside the office. Nowadays I can choose not to spend 3-4 hours a day on public transport. Clearly not everyone can do it, but the paths I have traveled up to now have allowed us to have a job independent of the place where we live. The internet is a good thing for us, the ease of communicating and running your business anywhere and anytime is just great. Our goal of this temporary disconnection is to understand its meaning, learn how to use the tools, decreasing our dependence on them. How much time do I waste just scrolling through content without purpose?
The magic of birches 
Trees are majestic 
The forest 
Woods are sending me love
The hours still pass between reading, questions, walks and observation of nature with all the senses: listening, touching, breathing, looking and tasting. Well yeah, I also wanted to taste the pine resin that comes out after the deer ate the freshest needles. A drop of resin won’t kill me, but I don’t advise anyone to try, I don’t know effects and/or contraindications. The flavor remains in the mouth for a long time and only one drop has the ability to spread throughout the palate and up inside of the nose. It seems to have eaten an incense stick, which, all in all, is pleasant and fun. In the evening I continue to enjoy my wine in front of the window, I wait for the day to pass by reading a few pages and I go to sleep without having seen any news online. Actually, an SMS arrives (I have not completely disconnected the telephone line), A person asking me: are you okay? Well I was very pleased with that and of course, I replied. It took a few hours disconnected that our visible state of “last connection yesterday” made someone worry. I am not alone in the world and it is something I must always pay attention to.
The day after, let’s reconnect.
Sunday morning I wake up naturally at dawn, without forcing. No, the phone is not on the bedside table. How automatic is that gesture of searching for the object? Is it will or dependence? I choose to take a walk in the woods again before breakfast and then I reactivate the connection. Messages arrive in many applications, emails, notifications of who did what, of people saying where they will go and what they would like to do. Do I really need to know that a friend of ours will participate in that event? I get a lot of requests for reviews and content sharing, I also delete those. It’s Sunday, no work material arrives. There is something important and urgent in those dozens of communications: no. But some of them make me agitated and for most of the morning I go back to a fake news I read, but why? How much power do they have over us? I just can’t get it out of my mind, and so I decided to focus on the emotions I feel: anxiety, agitation, anger, bewilderment. After a day of peace, tranquility and well-being, it only took few minutes to return to a state of negativity. Should I delete the applications? No, I think it is much more constructive, albeit more complicated, to decide and be aware of what to accept and what to simply let them go. These events gain importance when I, perhaps unwittingly, give them.
In conclusion, dear friends, in this precious little experiment, the most important thing I have observed is the difficulty of being aware. Aware of their choices, their emotions, their path. Getting carried away is simple and immediate, but our emotions lead us to unawareness. I don’t know why, but I do, I move, I decide by following something or someone without thinking. After a day of leisure I would say that awareness is the most important lesson I add to my personal toolbox that I will use on a daily basis.
Now I can finally turn on some music and finish the bottle of wine enjoying the place I am in, with the happiness of having added something more to myself.
