More Lessons from DWE
Our second weekly Day Without Electricity was Sunday, 3/22, and it seems that every time we go through this exercise, we learn a few more things. What did we learn this time? Don't do it on Sunday.
Every time we turn off the electricity, we can see the spinning disk that counts up the kilowatt hours we're using slow down and stop. That's really gratifying. What's less visible is the way that anxieties and distractions similarly slow down and stop. Sure, my brain is working just as hard and fast as it ever was, but now it's on the problems I have right in front of me. Not some artificial, self-induced datacrisis that comes because there's drama on Facebook or not enough people are following me on Twitter. Usually, I'm faced with an actual problem like "How can I make an oven that works without electricity and isn't solar?" "How can I build a brick wall on a sloped surface using only the tools I have?" These problems require me to sit down and bring a lot of focus to bear - to look at the stuff I have available to me in new ways and be scrappy about solving my problems. Every time we do this, I end up asking myself "How much more can we do without?"
Here's another thing that happens. You can't charge anything. Sure, I can spend all Saturday listening to books in my iPod as I work, but by Saturday afternoon, it's dead. If I don't charge my phone Friday, it's dead by Saturday, so it's just as well to shut it off. And if you can't charge anything, things are dead and nothing tweets, beeps or pings at you. This means that Saturday morning, when my phone still has a charge and there's nothing else to distract me, is a great time to call my mother.
When you're not distracting yourself minute by minute with tiny things, time slows down. An hour spent talking with a family member, or a friend; an hour spent on a task (or two or three) is a long time. Longer than you probably need, but the luxury is that you have that time to take. It's beautiful.
Right now, the Pirate and I are working on the outside of our house. We've got three projects defined, and about half a dozen more sort of in the queue. These are all things that have needed doing for months if not years, but we just hadn't gotten around to them. It seems, though, that the simple act of turning off the electricity has slowed down time for us. Suddenly the time is there and these things are getting done.
It's sort of like a miracle. We've made a miracle.
But then...you have to turn it all back on. You have to speed back up and do everything with fewer cycles. You have to make the switch from one thing to another at the speed of packets moving across the ether. That's a tough switch to make all at once. When we did it last Saturday, and on previous Saturdays, we turned things back on Saturday night. We checked our email, we did our blog posts, we caught up on all our cyber-tasks and were back in the game bright and early Monday morning.
This time, the breakers all went back on at ~7 Sunday night, right in the middle of making dinner, getting everyone ready for the next day, trying to get to bed at a decent hour. We went to bed and woke up still half in that slower, more considered mindset, but there just wasn't time for it and it felt like it took forever for my brain to get up to speed this morning.
So, that was the lesson. That, and when I asked the Pirate "What bad thing would happen if we just never turned the power back on?" he was right there with the answer.
All of our frozen foods would melt, and we'd never be able to telecommute again.
Every time we turn off the electricity, we can see the spinning disk that counts up the kilowatt hours we're using slow down and stop. That's really gratifying. What's less visible is the way that anxieties and distractions similarly slow down and stop. Sure, my brain is working just as hard and fast as it ever was, but now it's on the problems I have right in front of me. Not some artificial, self-induced datacrisis that comes because there's drama on Facebook or not enough people are following me on Twitter. Usually, I'm faced with an actual problem like "How can I make an oven that works without electricity and isn't solar?" "How can I build a brick wall on a sloped surface using only the tools I have?" These problems require me to sit down and bring a lot of focus to bear - to look at the stuff I have available to me in new ways and be scrappy about solving my problems. Every time we do this, I end up asking myself "How much more can we do without?"
Here's another thing that happens. You can't charge anything. Sure, I can spend all Saturday listening to books in my iPod as I work, but by Saturday afternoon, it's dead. If I don't charge my phone Friday, it's dead by Saturday, so it's just as well to shut it off. And if you can't charge anything, things are dead and nothing tweets, beeps or pings at you. This means that Saturday morning, when my phone still has a charge and there's nothing else to distract me, is a great time to call my mother.
When you're not distracting yourself minute by minute with tiny things, time slows down. An hour spent talking with a family member, or a friend; an hour spent on a task (or two or three) is a long time. Longer than you probably need, but the luxury is that you have that time to take. It's beautiful.
Right now, the Pirate and I are working on the outside of our house. We've got three projects defined, and about half a dozen more sort of in the queue. These are all things that have needed doing for months if not years, but we just hadn't gotten around to them. It seems, though, that the simple act of turning off the electricity has slowed down time for us. Suddenly the time is there and these things are getting done.
It's sort of like a miracle. We've made a miracle.
But then...you have to turn it all back on. You have to speed back up and do everything with fewer cycles. You have to make the switch from one thing to another at the speed of packets moving across the ether. That's a tough switch to make all at once. When we did it last Saturday, and on previous Saturdays, we turned things back on Saturday night. We checked our email, we did our blog posts, we caught up on all our cyber-tasks and were back in the game bright and early Monday morning.
This time, the breakers all went back on at ~7 Sunday night, right in the middle of making dinner, getting everyone ready for the next day, trying to get to bed at a decent hour. We went to bed and woke up still half in that slower, more considered mindset, but there just wasn't time for it and it felt like it took forever for my brain to get up to speed this morning.
So, that was the lesson. That, and when I asked the Pirate "What bad thing would happen if we just never turned the power back on?" he was right there with the answer.
All of our frozen foods would melt, and we'd never be able to telecommute again.
posted by Aoibheall | 9:25 PM
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