Limited Connectivity

I don't know what is more depressing: February in New England or The Internet.

Both have been messing with my head. Or so it seemed.

It's easy to get dragged down into the deep, dark winter around here. The days are short. The nights are long. The sun is scarce.

My need for light is overwhelming sometimes. And so, understandably, the bright, flickering screen of a laptop is enticing. It lures me into another world, a welcome escape from the bottomless pit of a New England freeze. And maybe most appealing of all, it demands nothing of me, other than my passive presence. All I have to do is show up at my kitchen table, and The Internet takes care of the rest, providing me with a convenient winter hide-out.

But after awhile, I start to take notice. All those bad laptop ions seep into my already winter-blued brain. My Yahoo homepage is filled with dreary headlines on the state of the world, country and even my own small town. My email inbox overflows with nothing but 25% off offers from Lands End and Pottery Barn, but in this economy, we really shouldn't be frivolously spending money. My social networking sites start to resemble a high school reunion gone terribly wrong.

And then, finally, I wonder, is it really the bleak winter days that are to be blamed for my narrowing world, or is it the damn Internet?

It's the Internet.

So I unplugged last week. I stopped logging into Facebook and reading about my happy friends' beautiful, successful lives. I didn't peak at my Google email telling me to post something on my blog. I didn't even succumb to the temptation of the local 5 day weather forecast website, for obvious reasons. Nope, instead I powered down my machine, my mother's little helper of the 21st century.

What did I do without Firefox by my side?

I visited a museum. A real, live museum that didn't have the word 'Children's' in front of it. I stood in the middle of a room and absorbed thought-provoking-not-for-young-kids exhibits.

I went out to a fancy shmancy restaurant with my husband, ordered a $19 glass of chardonnay and ate escargot and truffles. Decadence on a plate.

I practiced yoga (and, oh, it felt good).

I sat in a beautiful city church on a brisk Sunday morning and listened to a choir sing (I know, this one's hard to believe, but really, I did, and that felt good, too).

And I read this article in the NY Times about integrating yoga and food, and generally bringing our senses back to life, without technology getting in the way.

There is a new yoga class that serves up savory dishes to students immediately after class. The post-yoga food, they claim, tastes, smells and even feels better than it would have pre-yoga.

The idea is that by engaging in a sensory peaking activity, yoga in this case, we perceive the world around us differently. Everything becomes positively magnified.

This is not a new finding. Do you remember, as a teenager, falling in love for the first time? Flowers smelled sweeter, the sky looked bluer, parents became nicer. Teenage love, it seemed, heightened our senses, making everything around us, well, more desirable.

Unplugging for periods of time and engaging with the world in non-routine ways, I found, have a similar effect. During my week with limited connectivity, my kids became more interesting, the written word more inspiring. The snow covered branches outside my window turned from daunting to near-brilliant.

I experienced, first hand, the little known 'Logged Off Effect'.

David Romanelli, a young, Grateful-Dead-listening yoga instructor, puts it even more simply, “'Remember before you had your first e-mail address or your first cellphone,” he said. “Don’t you think that your food tasted better back then?'”

Yes, Mr. Romanelli, yes.