#DigitalDetox Challenge 5, and I’d like to forget the week

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Each of these #DigitalDetox challenges are meant to be a way for me to explore a part of myself that has been long forgotten. Not only am I doing things that disconnect me from the internet world, even for a short time, but I'm also doing some activities that I had once done and no longer do for whatever reason.

This last week has been an emotional roller coaster. I started the week with the pressure of trying to finish an editorial contract (a big job), but we were still under Level 3 lockdown (more on that below). Other tasks were piling up, and the energy was gone. And I knew I needed to put the #DigitalDetox challenge into the mix, so I forced myself.

This week's challenge was to draw a self-portrait. I'm not artistic in the visual sense, so unless I wanted to resort to drawing stick figures, I chose another approach.

Instead of creating a visual self-portrait, I chose to create a literary self-portrait. I won't be sharing the literary self-portrait with the world, but it was an interesting exercise.

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#DigitalDetox Challenge 4: Meditate for 30 Minutes

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It's the second week at attempting this challenge and I can honestly say that I'm now eating slower.

Yep, you read that right: eating slower.

I know it sounds odd, but I found a meditation practice that is performed while eating. And I like it!

Even as I write that, I'm giggling at the bizarre nature of that statement, but it turns out that meditation is the practice of focused breathing. There is no reason why it should be performed sitting in the lotus position with your eyes closed and doing absolutely nothing for hours on end. Meditation actually comes in all shapes and sizes. It's just a matter of working out what forms of meditation work best for the individual.

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#DigitalDetox Meditation and Lockdown… NOPE!

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This week's #DigitalDetox challenge was to meditate for 30 minutes. I tried... I honestly tried, but every time I thought about getting in the meditation challenge, there would be another distraction.

First, it would be the cat, who I swear had been given an energy pill and let loose on a sleeping household. Then it was the hubby, quickly followed by the son being evicted from his bedroom by the hubby working from home. And come the afternoon, it was the daughter and her online dance classes.

Yeah, it turns out that online dance classes (conducted over Zoom) are a thing. And there's only so much concentration that one can get while listening to fast jazz music while the teacher is shouting out the names of dance moves in French. (I so hope that none of that actually went into the client's manuscript I was editing at the time.)

When I tried to piece it all together, there just wasn't a nice window of opportunity. But I suppose that was this week's lesson.

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#DigitalDetox Challenges, Lockdowns and Teenagers… Oh My!

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I'm at the end of the third week of my #DigitalDetox challenge adventure... and talk about adventures. Things got totally derailed in ways that were expected, just not this soon. And it made doing the little challenges within my little #DigitalDetox coloring book all the more important. Because it gave me time to breathe!

So... This week, not only was I attempting to finish last week's challenge of writing someone a letter, but I had this week's challenge of spend 30 minutes looking at the clouds. AND my home country of New Zealand decided to go into Level 4 Lockdown in the middle of all of this, thrusting two teenagers into home learning situations again.

Yeah... Life is always filled with unexpected turns.

So... Here's how the week went.

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#DigitalDetox Challenge 2: Write someone a letter

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So... It turns out that not only am I obsessed with minimizing the influence that social media and the internet have on my daily life, but I'm also incredibly busy that I forget to take just a few short minutes to do the simple things.

This week's #DigitalDetox challenge was to write someone a letter. You would think that for a writer, this one would be simple. But the truth was a bitter pill to take.

I had colored in the picture for the challenge, and... Yeah... Um... That is sort of where it ended. I had allowed my busy schedule and my interactions with others to take over, and when it came time to recharge... Well... I binge watched Friends on Netflix.

So, there were a few lessons to learn from this week's experience.

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