I’m walkin!

How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?

I find that looking away into the distance helps me to snap out of the funk I may be in. I use my devices as sources of white noise. They play in the background while I continue to complete my art or if I am researching online on a specific topic. I work from home and where I live, the work hours of 9-5 are silent, so even the slightest sound, of say, the spindle dropping in the lock, when someone opens a door, reverberates and makes me jump. The TV or music is only to ensure that I don’t die of fright while working at home. I prefer to write in absolute silence and I look for a topic to research on in absolute silence, but the actual research I have no issues doing that with white noise.

That being said, to be honest, I don’t like to multitask because I find that you never do justice to the tasks you are working on. For instance, if you insist that you can listen to music and study, you don’t do enough of either and soon both become boring because of the association of music or a particular song to a particular subject. I prefer to just listen to music or just do my studies. You can focus and finish the task faster and you get the time to listen and enjoy the music.

The pandemic was the catalyst that brought about a change in the way we use our devices. We discovered that we had a lot of free time on hand and started to explore the devices and identified a plethora of activities we could indulge in sitting in one place. Those of us who would sit on it for work continued to do so and the rest of us who used it for entertainment were glued to it. Pre-pandemic, I knew that anything more than an hour of device time and the kids were fried, they were too exhausted to be able to focus on anything. And it was nap time so their brains had the required rest to reboot itself.

Then the pandemic hit and everything including education and sports moved online. The first week we were ready to audition for the “Walking Dead” series – the kids would walk around with overstimulated brains, unable to focus, with no idea about what was happening around them. They were perpetually exhausted but would want to continue to sit in front of a device. A couple of things happened that week, first, the internet we had at home would just go offline or glitch and leave everyone staring and wondering what happened. And second, that’s when I realized that the kids had been silent all along. Our conversations had moved online and we talked and laughed. Online. It was during one of these ‘off’ moments that the kids started an argument about who was hogging the internet. I heard the logic, the irritation, and their voices after a spell. And I wanted more. This is when I got the idea to manually turn things off when I felt they were losing control. Unplugging became the most important thing we did during the day. The second week, we made a schedule, for every hour they sat on the device, I made them get up and run around the house, completing chores or dribbling a ball around the room. It was also the time the internet got rebooted so it would work seamlessly when they were online in class. It became something of a game, but it helped them to refocus their brains and I am glad the resident in the apartment below us was not at home during those months.

Eventually outdoor activities resumed and the detanned kids stepped out into the sun, and their tan deepened. Muscles that had gone lax started to tighten and they started to enjoy this new norm. They had access to devices and had discovered the various ways to utilize them for their benefit, so leaving kids device-less would hinder the progress they had made. But with this, the physical activity acted like the perfect buffer. Kids used devices during the day for certain activities and then in the evenings participated in numerous after-school sports clubs or enrichment clubs that helped them step away from being plugged.

We are four years post-pandemic and while having a device on hand is a great way to keep communication channels open, it’s also something no one wants to leave behind. It’s probably because no one wants to be Nos.2 on the information highway. Instantaneous! We want the information first. We want everything this instant. That’s how we live our lives today. FOMO. The one thing the pandemic highlighted was that everyone had this innate fear that they would be left out. Pre-pandemic, having access to information from numerous sources was sufficient. Once the pandemic hit, when newspapers, televisions, and radio our most common modes of communication got hit, social media channels like Instagram and Twitter bridged the gap. I still remember those initial days when visuals and screenshots of those red dots spreading on world maps made it to every WhatsApp community group. The statistics. The requests to isolate. The orders to sanitize. Eventually, the rumors on how it started and how it would end played like an endless loop of doomsday prophesying on these groups. Being pluggedin was not important, staying plugged in was. That’s when it started.

Around this time, I realized that I had started to panic every time the bell rang. One of the most important things the pandemic had done was to guarantee private space. No one dared to encroach into your private space. Social distancing meant that guests would call you and you would stand a few feet apart to have a conversation. Your doorway was your Lakshman Rekha and no one wanted to cross it and bridge that gap. For lack of any new entertainment to discuss, statistics became the default topic. The numbers were hopeless and depressing. I knew I had to stop. One fine day, I just made the kids step out of the house without their devices to go on a walk around the block. On that first walk, we alternated between stomping feet and dragging feet, arguments, and constant pouts. But a week later, we realized that we preferred these walks to just sitting around the house. We had unplugged. And it was a welcome break. It’s been many weeks since that first walk with Stomper and Dragger, but now we have some kind of a crazy schedule over the weekends when we step out either for a meal or to pick up something physically to ensure we get those steps marked off the list.