I Threw It All Away
One year ago Zack, Ellie, and I were rolling along a dusty Bureau of Land Management road somewhere at the foot of the Eastern Sierra.
As the Jeep skipped along the hole ridden, bumpy boondock road our butts hopped and bopped around in our seats and we couldn’t help but laugh. The wholesome yet funky guitar lick of “Althea” trickled through the speakers and the spirit of the Grateful Dead echoed through space as Jerry’s voice lightly brushed the words, “nobody’s messing with you, but you”.
Every January around the turn of the year the three of us take a short trip together. In Lieu of fancy celebrations or romantic new year’s cliches we head out somewhere off the beaten path and just spend time together. Sometimes we reminisce on the past or reflect on the future, but mostly we focus on enjoying whatever it is we get up to - climbing or hiking or simply watching the sun set.
This New Year we headed up to the lost coast and an old growth redwood forest, more on that later.
In the Jeep, Zack is steering the course of our adventure, he has one hand on the wheel and one hand hanging free out the window. Both Ellie and I have our heads hanging out of the passenger window. The crisp winter air is whipping and chapping our faces, but neither of us seems to care. Each of us in our own way longs to feel the pulse of nature nipping at our heels and flushed across our faces, the wildness of her spirit pressed closely to our skin. I stuck my face a little further out the passenger window, breathed in deeply against the icy wind, and the corner of my eye caught a glimpse into the side mirror, I watched the last speck of civilization disappear in the trail of dust left behind the rolling wheels of the Jeep as it rocketed us closer to our mountain sized dreams.
Sadly for me, the buck stops here. My memory takes a hard right, and the clear structured vision of this happy moment of adventure ends…
I pulled out my phone to take a picture for Instagram, an impulse born of the stickiness of habit rather than the sharpness of thoughtfulness and creativity. I passed Ellie over to Zack’s lap to get her out of my way (how rude of me). I pulled the little glowing screen up to my face and within a split second I was catapulted into a hypnotic blur of technological tunnel vision. The blinders were on and my presence was gone. My skin stopped tingling from the chill of the wind, my eyes no longer skipped along the beautiful mountain colors that necklaced the horizon line. My mind was no longer willing nor available to track the enjoyment I was destined to embody. For that moment in time I was lost in technology, the amalgamation of past and future distraction.
I search with a sort of useless urgency to find a decent framing of the colorful and textured world passing before me, but as soon as I pressed my finger onto the screen to capture the image something catches my ear, it is Jerry Garcia’s voice again, “There are things you can replace, and others you cannot”. A chilly, clearing gust of wind blows into my face, knocking my phone clean out of my hand, blowing a rush of life in one ear and out the other, and sends my long loose and wild hair slapping across my eyes, nature’s way of knocking some sense into me no doubt.
For this one discombobulated split second I feel a pang of a kind of sadness riding on the wind, as if the air was somehow miry with foreboding regret. It wafted around my nerves and made the hair on my arms stand straight. I know this feeling well, I am sure we all do, it is the unmistakable feeling of existential discord that arises when you catch your own mind dropping out of the present moment, leaving the body and spirit behind, and attaching to an outward facing expectation, an end result, a distraction.
“Why the hell did I just pull out my phone right now….?”, I wondered to myself in the privacy of my own drifting mind.
If I am being honest, I had become more and more aware of the effect screen time had on my mental health, and I had notice that social media usually left me slogging through a lethargic residue of dissatisfaction. The advertisements, the false sense of connection, the useless information I had about people I did not actually care to know, the judgement, the comparison games, the ‘vulnerability’, the fake news, the addictive nature of participating…
Why was I taking time out my day to participate in something that often felt like a waste of time, energy, and brain power?
Why was I spending any of my down time contributing through a social medium that made me feel like garbage?
And does any of this really matter in the grand scheme if my life?
My brother-in-law, Nick, a boot strapping kind of business savvy guy, has an expression that I love to remember when I’m worried about trivial things or tangled up in minutia. The expression is, “ don’t mean shit to a tree”. And driving into the mountainous horizon this day, mentally entangled in the minutia of social media and screen time was a good moment for a “don’t mean shit to a tree” reality check.
Social media don’t mean shit to a tree. Truth be told it don’t mean shit to me, and in that fleeting moment in the car last year I was able to see that clearly. I can either live my life as it pours out around me or I can miss out on it in my own attempt to reduce it to ‘instagramable’ moments and clipped captions.
So, I signed off Instagram, exit out of the app, put my phone permanently on ‘do not disturb’, and turned my phone off for the remainder of that trip. Just like that, unceremoniously and unexpectedly, I dropped out of the social media jungle.
I didn’t make anyone suffer through a goodbye post, I didn’t cast any judgment towards those who live for the feeling of connection they extract from digital personas, nor did I offer any criticism towards the algorithms and advertisements that were starting to melt my brain. I just bowed out from participating in something I no longer benefited from.
Now, a year later, I still have yet to reopen any social media accounts, and my phone still remains on ‘do not disturb’.
Truth be told I never intend to leave social media for good, but once I started to feel more clear and creative and present in my day to day life I just could not rationalize getting back on, and I still can’t. In a way, I feel like I got a tiny but important part of my mind and self back. I make better choice for my mental and physical health, I spend more time with my loved ones, I have time to read and write more regularly, and I have exponentially decreased the amount of time I spend looking into a screen.
And most importantly I am more present for my life as it is happening, and I see it through open eyes and a clear mind.
As I mentioned before, this new years Zack, Ellie, and I headed up north to the lost coast and an old growth redwood forest to celebrate the end of one decade and the beginning of a new.
We left our leashes behind and ran along black pebbled beaches, in rain and in shine, and hiked along side grand trees that settled this land long before any of our ancestors knew it existed. Our car ride was once again decorated in the immortal words of the Grateful Dead, but our time outside was spent in the raging quietude of mom nature.
The lost coast is a beautifully wild, and refreshingly rugged place.
“I’m proud of myself” I said to Zack on New Year’s Eve.
“I think I’ve spent real time understanding who I am this year, on my own terms. I think I am a little less hard on myself. And I feel like I have gotten to know myself better. And I don’t know why, but I feel like I want to take a moment to validate that for myself right now. And to recommit to continuing on with…evolving as human being… and understanding myself…. and being….”
I took a long pause to think.
And then out of my quietness I heard Zack’s sweet voice pierce through.
“Free.” he said.
Yes, that is exactly it. This year I want to continue being free.
Free as a bird flying high through the trees.
Words and photos by Erin Cookston
Video of the Dead, for your enjoyment ;)
