Thursday, July 12, 2007

The Importance of Unplugging





I spent the past few days in northern Vermont relaxing on Lake Champlain with my husband’s extended family. Although the weather was less than ideal (it rained for at least part of every day we were there), it provided a wonderful opportunity to unplug for a while. We are so dependent on modern technology. I know I find it hard to believe that I didn’t even learn how to type on a computer until I was in college. Remember typewriters? Without the internet, the way I work would be radically different and considerably harder. But the internet has made it possible to work from anywhere, thereby making it that much harder to take a real vacation where you leave the world behind, at least temporarily.

My husband telecommutes for his job. This is a wonderful thing. When he wanted to bring his laptop on vacation with us, however, I asked him not to. He is so attached to his laptop, at times I feel like it is actually an appendage on him. It is his source of work, news, and entertainment. So, for five blissful days, we were laptop free, computer free, and internet free. I would have liked to have gone TV free as well but the other 6 people with whom I was sharing our cabin would certainly not have embraced that idea. I was not pushing my luck. Just taking the break from the computer was good. It was necessarily to provide the psychological break from work.

Of course, now I am back, and the emails have piled up and there is work to be done. My husband was on a conference call this afternoon, just a couple hours after we returned. Life has quickly returned back to normal, but we are refreshed and relaxed. We had a true vacation and that is how it should be.

1 comment:

Leticia said...

Did you go to Isle La Motte, in the lake, to St. Ann's Shrine? It's lovely, and is surrounded by the lake.

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