Obviously, I'm Addicted

Last Wednesday I made a vow not to turn on email until after lunch each day. Here’s my report:  Thursday:  How embarrassing. The buzz behind my shut-down email feels, honestly, like a newscaster announcing who’ll be president, but I can’t hear. I realize that I typically head to my desk leaning forward, a curiosity and a bit of dread. I have (happily and willingly) several irons in the fire that I usually at least check on first thing, before I begin writing. This morning I felt edgy and relieved. Okay, so I have the whole morning. But by 11:45 I’ve come close to the end of what I’d hoped to accomplish writing today and am sorely tested, wanting to check email. I can feel it like an addictive pull, actually. What is there that I MUST know, NEED to know right NOW? It might be something good. Something pressing. BUT, I did better work today. More focused on the task at hand. Truly.Caveat: I do allow myself to retrieve and read things from the Internet that I’m using for my writing.  Friday:  I lay in bed last night with my IPad balanced on my stomach taking care of a couple of last minute emails, since I knew I couldn’t do it this morning. I hate to admit it, but I am genuinely uneasy about having email shut down. I guess if I were deep into writing a novel or some continuous piece of work, I would have a momentum and hardly notice. Still, this is an important thing to look at, how I choose distraction. How I’ve chosen to let the world.Saturday: I noticed a different level of activity in my brain yesterday, no joke. Less hyperness. I made a list as I thought of them of things I needed to email people about, and then after lunch I turned on my email and finished in 45 min. Left it on until after dinner, but only checked once. Today I’m not in  the middle of one particular project/poem/essay, so I’m feeling the itch to have that online party. But I promised. We’ll be at the opera all afternoon and can’t check then, so I’ll violate my agreement a small bit and check probably just before lunch.This is not a time matter, it’s a brain matter. The way the brain waves are stirred into a froth by a barrage of stimuli. Not unlike a one-armed bandit at the casino. People have written about that. Sunday: I’m a bit scattered already. The newspaper was late so I was reading the NY Times on the IPad, checking Facebook for a message from Rachel Simon, who was supposed to be reading here on Tuesday (east coast storm caused postponement). But when I sit down at the computer for a while, I’m not on email and don’t plan to be until later in the day.Monday: I opened email about 11:00 because I have a student’s work there that I need to get and copy to my files so I can start commenting on it. I glanced at the mail—not much there. But I turned it off right away. Tuesday:  I had to open email to get to that student’s thesis and copy it to my files. Forgot to do this yesterday when I was getting her critical paper.  This was about 10:30. I could’ve waited, but it would’ve messed up my work day. But I quickly shut mail down again. (Answered two things, I admit.) I find that there’s rarely much that MUST be answered, but there’s the fluff to sift through. It’s that fluff that sends my brain into overdrive.Wednesday: I’ve finished my student’s work and I’m about to revise this blog. After a week: The issue, it appears, is not so much WHAT I work on, but that I reduce the general noise, the jittery back-and-forth. And it’s not only for my writing, it’s for the state of my mind.I didn’t have a TV until I was 13. My mind didn’t get wired for high stimuli early. I’m not hooked on Facebook (I’m too old, I think), although I do check it occasionally in the evenings and post these blogs (and occasional political things I can’t stop myself from!) when I’m sitting around not working or not reading a book. I’m the perfect age to be writing about cyber-issues, since I’ve known a radically different condition of mind. But over the past few years, especially since I’m not teaching full time any more, I’ve let myself drift into a habit that just plain isn’t good for me, isn’t good for my work, and frankly I don’t think is good for the planet.I’m going to continue to relegate email to a secondary position. Very deliberately, with a locked-in time to turn it on. It’s a discipline. I notice that in this world that’s utterly swamped by consumerism, almost everything good for us has to be a discipline. We have to watch everything—what we eat, how we spend our time and money, etc.—or we get sucked into the default maelstrom, and we lose track of what we are, of our actual, flesh-and-blood lives.We are obsessed by what has passed and what will be. “What strikes me is the total disappearance of the present” -- Jean-Claude Carrière (in This is Not the End of the Book, Northwestern University Press, 2012. I’ll write about this book soon.)