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I’m not sure if this quote resonates with me because of our recent adventures in the mountains of Asheville, or because it struck a chord with my my inner, caterpillar-collecting, frog-catching tomboy child that still lives inside of me. Or if it is because I’m feeling a sense of space that I wasn’t quite able to grasp when we lived in DC. (I swear to you, the sky seems bigger here in Kentucky.) But whichever the reason, I wanted to share it because between all of the buzzing and the beeping and the push notifications and the friend requests…we’re all a bit tech’d out. Our lives have turned inward towards a bright screen instead of outward towards the bright sky, the tall trees, the green grass…you know, #reallife.

Especially for those of us whose work is tied to that bright, brilliant screen. For the majority of the time, we experience the whole wide world through the world wide web. And we are so accustomed to viewing reality through the lens of an iPhone that even when we are out there, choosing to walk through the trees, sail the oceans, dig our toes in wet sand…there’s a little voice secretly saying, “what Instagram filter would capture this moment best?”

I know my generation will be the last one to remember a time where we didn’t have computers in our pockets. (We only had them for an hour or two a week in the school computer lab, and spent most of our time trying not to die of cholera on Oregon Trail or making super cool rainbow designs in Microsoft Paint.) And I’m not saying that this fact is a bad thing – many of us Millennials, (hand raised) are where we are today, doing what we do and having what we have because we were exposed to the vastness of the Internet at such an early age. (For more on that, check out my good friend CJ’s well-crafted post on the importance of the internet.)

But I think it would do us a whole lot of good to take it back once in a while, #tbt or #flashbackfriday if you will, to a time where you could experience moments that didn’t need sharing with the rest of the world to validate that they actually happened. A exploration out into the world – the one outside your front door – completely out of social media context. Switch our mental service to “roaming.”

To sum it up and prove that it’s about that time for me to step away from the keyboard: let’s go “Thoreau” ourselves out there a bit more, eh?

(ps: you can bring this quote into your living room via this fabulous Etsy shop. Ironically owned and operated by another CJ.)