addicted to input - what are we afraid of?

        I’m here for my annual summer visit to an enchanted lakeside cabin in New York’s Adirondacks, now welcoming its fifth generation of family. On my first day, for 12 hours, I had the rare experience of time spent entirely alone. I puttered and provisioned for the oncoming hordes, took Daisy for a walk, read my book, made myself a simple dinner (bagel with avocado and tomato). fixed myself a bowl of ice cream, then walked down to the dock to enjoy the setting sun.
            The first thing I noticed, I’m abashed to say, was that I’d forgotten my book. Also my phone. My interior voice cried out in alarm, what am I supposed to do now?!
            I couldn’t take pictures of the lovely scene to send to my family. I couldn’t text anyone to tell them about my day. I had no means of occupying my scattered brain, filling its insatiable need to consume input in order to avoid…what?
            I had already decided to go cold turkey on cell phone games and puzzles for this 2-week vacation period. I could sense a slight frisson of panic that was driving me to open Spelling Bee, Strands, Stepwords, Tightrope, Wordle or the New York Times crossword puzzle any time I had a moment of idle time – waiting in line, while the kettle boils, on the toilet, at a stop light. It is embarrassingly difficult to stop.
            So far I’ve succeeded in avoiding games, but I still check my phone incessantly – any communications from anyone? What’s in the news? How will the weather be tomorrow? How many steps have I walked today? How far is Herzegovina from Sicily? I don’t want to leave it behind – my phone is my clock, my camera, my calendar, my communication hub to all the people I love – but it’s sucking my attention like a black hole.
            Sitting there on the dock beside the lake at sunset, I made myself sit still. I had the ice cream to finish, of course, but after that distraction was eliminated I kept myself free of the firehose-consumption of external data. I looked around, saw some blips and rings on the water. After a while I noticed the flash of a tiny fish, launching itself in a little crescent arc as it fed on some water bugs that skated across the surface of the lake. Wow. There’s actually a lot happening out here in the world.
              Why don’t we sit in solitude more often? Are we afraid of quiet? Of ourselves? Of irrelevance? Of acknowledging that we are no more pertinent to the turning of the Earth than the water bug about to become dinner for a minnow?
              Manufactured input squelches our observations, not only of the world outside of us, but the thoughts inside of us. We should probably be afraid of that.