Taking a hands-on break from the digital

I spend so much time in front of a computer, writing and designing, or on the smartphone where I read every interesting book and I can get in ebook format. Online activities take up a lot of time as well, whether it’s searching for information and images for work projects or keeping up with the twitter verse. But I notice all that media overload sometimes hinders a deeper thought process. At some point even signal can become noise, if there’s a constant stream. I have to ask myself, is my mind ever quiet and what are the consequences of filling it constantly with some form of digital noise?

The struggle is to find a way to clip the right noise at the right times to keep the brilliant signals sounding out. That’s where a hands-on kind of break helped today. I took moleskin and sat on the bed. A pen in my hand felt really strange, so unlike a keyboard, and yet words and thoughts poured from some unseen place inside me. The signal was clear. To feel paper, to listen to the wind in the trees outside the window, to breathe quiet, energized me to expand my personal reach.