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I just got back from taking a 10-day weaving workshop, learning the basics of backstrap weaving by spending 8 hours hand-spinning wool on a puska before it’s ready to use, setting the wool up between three nails to lay out the colors of the design, and weaving about two designs a day. I lived with my teacher, Alina, and her family in a village 45 minutes outside of Cusco called Chinchero. My schedule involved:
- 6:30: wake up, read, and write
- 7:45: eat breakfast
- 8:00: walk to the Center for Traditional Textiles weaving center (I walk, but my teacher/host-mom, Alina, usually runs because she’s late and they call roll right at 8:30)
- 8:30: Begin my weaving classes
- 12:30: Lunch break for lentils and rice, potatoes and rice, fish and rice, spaghetti and rice (insert ___ and rice)
- 1:30: Continue with a new form of weaving
- 5:00: Walk home, go on a run around the mountainside
- 6:00: Read and write in my journal
- 6:30: Sit in the kitchen with the family and hand spin wool, go get the sheep from the pasture, or just hang out until dinner is ready
- 7:30: Dinner
- 8:30: Play “balloon volleyball”, watch “Barbie Princesa” DVDs with the 8 year old daughter, Milet, help the family peel avas for breakfast the next morning
- 9:30: Bed
Writing this in the village, I’ve been “disconnected” from wifi and pretty much all form of communication for a week so far. This is the first time that I’ve truly been alone without internet, without friends or anyone my age to distract me. The first two days was that initial anxiety when you feel like you’re missing out on something or when you’re certain that a life-changing event is going to happen that you’re not going to know about. But once I realized that life is continuing on in its similar fashion, I can’t believe how overall relaxed I am and, what shocked me more, how much time I have. I didn’t realize how much time I waste doing nothing on the computer. The Internet is the largest manifestation of our society’s constant paradox of choice. With an entire world of options, how can I ever feel satisfied just doing what I’m doing right now? Now, I’m writing my first blog post in months, I’m going on runs, I’ve read four books, I get 9 hours of sleep, I look out the window every morning and actually see the mountains and appreciate the fresh air around me.
While I miss communicating with my friends back home and in Cusco, there’s something incredibly fresh about having to live right here and now, and having to be alone for a large portion of it. I think people believe I’m constantly on my phone because I think I get more anxiety about not responding to people than most others. E-mails I can leave for a couple of days, but messages of any kind, even if they’re from a complete stranger, I feel rude if I don’t respond right away. So while I miss knowing what everyone is up to, it’s been refreshing to have that pressure of constantly needing to communicate with people off of my shoulders. I’m a very extroverted person in that I recharge from being surrounded by people I love. But this has taught me the true difference of being alone vs. being lonely. Being in charge of what I want to do makes me feel independent. I’m alone or silent for a large portion of my day, focusing on my weaving and counting the number of strings needed for each part of the pattern. But, when I’m actively recharging by taking part in activities I enjoy, it’s crazy how much less lonely I feel than when I’m home and virtually connected to thousands of people online. Feeling lonely is exacerbated by seeing other people doing things I might be missing out on. By checking Facebook I feel like I’m tangentially included in everyone’s activities, when really, I’ve just spent hours looking at a screen. But when all I know is what’s going on around me, the only way I miss out is by wasting time on my phone and not being truly present in that moment. There’s no online community to convince me that I did and saw a ton of things without ever leaving my bed.
I’m fortunate enough to be in the position where nothing pressing is looming over my head via e-mail. I’m not waiting for a task from my boss, or need to check on kids at home, and since the internet is a 45-minute bus ride away, I can’t justify making that trip just to check Facebook and iMessage. If I hadn’t been living in this village with wifi so far away, I’m sure my willpower would have failed and I would have walked to a cafe to check in within the first few days. But since nearly everywhere you travel these days has wifi, I know that this might be one of the few times in my life I’m truly detached from the cyberworld and I’m trying to take full advantage of it. I’m not saying I’m going to go back and set fire to my computer and phone, I’m sure I’ll spend hours when I get back catching up on what I missed and convincing people that I’m alive and safe despite my lack of communication. But for now, I’m going to enjoy only having access to what’s right in front of me. And although I highly recommend disconnecting to anyone who has the option in their life, what I’ve really learned, is not that I have a lack of time in my normal life, but how easily I misallocate it and get distracted and tempted by superficial matters. I would try to turn my wifi off to write, but then be convinced that I had to look up this one thing in order to finish writing, which would then get me distracted and take hours to finish. But finding ways around writing with just the resources in front of me helps me focus and really hone in on exactly what I want to write. The Internet is an incredible thing, but no one should spend majority of our waking hours connected to a virtual world. The real world is far more interesting.
