I took a couple of days off of work last week in association with local spring break. Didn’t feel like much of a break for me, necessarily, as always things are busy around these parts, moreso than usual for the next couple of weeks, as long-standing commitments start coming to their ultimacy for some of us (which really means all of us, as is the way with families).

In conjunction with spring break (at least, that’s how I’m characterizing it), my mobile phone battery completely discharged some time on Thursday, and, given that I was on “vacation”, I just let it rest. Other than a couple of emails about a gig playing fill-in bass next month, I was totally off the global communications grid for four or five days.

And it was glorious.

Can I talk about how freeing that is? I just dropped out of that part of life for a couple of days, left the phone dead on the shelf, and went about my life without feeling stalked by electronic media. I took care of some errands, kept the kids out of trouble, took part in a Seder meal, got together with two different groups of friends to play board games and rpgs, did a deep cleaning and re-arrangment of a rather dirty fish tank, washed some clothes, played some guitar and got a little closer to fleshing out that song idea I mentioned, read a decent chunk of a pretty good novel, held an egg hunt sign for a very long time, and totally failed to finish Ni No Kuni like I intended, because the story kept going, and like most games from Level-5, I keep finding the final boss fight really hard.

It felt really good just barricading that aspect of life off by itself, behind dead batteries and hidden inside laptop cases for a while. I highly recommend figuring out a way to do it for yourself every now and then. You’ll thank yourself for making the effort.