Walking in Season: September 2010

Hellllllooooo, September!  Walking in Season has returned, but one day late this time around.  We were without internet on September 1st: contractors at the new house being built next door accidentally plowed through the underground internet cable yesterday.  (The day before that, they accidentally punched a hole in our sewer line, and before that, the owner of the house used our hose but forgot to turn the spigot off — oy!  Adventures in construction and good-neighborliness.)

After 24 hours without internet, our service has just now been restored.  The upshot of our forced hiatus from connectivity is that it reminded us how well — and how deeply and fluidly — we work and think when the distraction of the internet is absent.

In the first few disconnected hours, we were enlightened (and embarrassed) to observe how often we would try — just out of unthinking habit — to check e-mail, or blogs, or news, or weather, or try to Google information that, most often, actually wasn’t absolutely necessary to track down at the very instant we attempted to track it down.  We were amazed how often we would open our browsers before remembering, “Oh, right, no internet.”  We had suspected how fragmented our trains of thought had become by such habitual actions and perpetual distractions, but had not had a mirror held to our behaviors and their effects — until the Internet Hiatus.

And so, we adjusted.  (I will admit: I required more adjustment than Matt did.)  After a few hours of reconditioning, we were working better and thinking more clearly than we had in a very, very long time.  It made us so happy.  In the end, we became thankful for the interruption of service!

In fact, we liked the effects so much that we have decided to try a new internet policy around our house: setting hours during which to take care of internet business and partake of internet entertainment, and turning the internet off the rest of the time.

I am a big, big, big advocate of removing temptations from one’s environment, rather than relying on willpower alone to resist them and then feeling doubly bad when that willpower inevitably fails.  We are human, after all, and our willpower is a limited resource.  Best to conserve and spend it wisely — such as, you know, by using it to force oneself to delve into the statistics manuals one has been avoiding for years, rather than to prevent oneself from comparison shopping for birth balls or reading favorite blogs.  (Ahem.)  The former is a lot easier when the latter options have been removed from one’s environment.

And now, without further ado (some might say, without further distraction), September’s Walking in Season photos!  The full set (January-present) can be viewed at Flickr here.  The photos were indeed taken on September 1, but unfortunately, at mid-day, in harsh lighting.  Since January, Stop 4 has undergone the biggest transformation of all the stops, methinks: from high-water wetland to green field filled with invasive grasses.

We have begun to wonder: will the wetlands ever be wet again?  It looks like Hurricane Earl, if he arrives, will bring wind but little rain…

Happy September, everyone!  You have my word: I’ll report back on our Internet Hours experiment after we’ve let it run for awhile.

Stop 1.  Indian summer colors.

Stop 1.5.  Hazy — there was a ground-level ozone warning that day.  We made our walk a short one.

Stop 3.  The wetlands have become fields.

Stop 3.  Cool under the trees.

Stop 4.  Will it ever be a wetland again?  Check out the full year’s progression starting here.