Tomorrow I am off for my annual Unplugged weekend. Don't be interesting in my absence.
— Peter Sagal (@petersagal) July 19, 2013
.@ubertragnersinn Every summer, I go to a retreat where there is no Internet, and no cell phones allowed. It's amazing. You look up.
— Peter Sagal (@petersagal) July 19, 2013
I read this passage by Bartunde Thurston
“I am here” day is a time to “set aside our technology and to-do lists, choose a quarter of the city we wanted to know better, and explore it for a full day… . [It is] a kind of antimodern communal experiment: giving our gadgets a secular Sabbath; reveling in friendship and conversation of a kind that Facebook doesn’t do; being thickly in one place, not thinly everywhere.”
about an hour before I stumbled across this in the Epilog to War and Peace.
Thurston credits the "I am here" day to Priya Parker and her husband, but it sure looks to me like Tolstoy beat them to the idea about 150 years ago....but here I am. Here I am. And there was nothing more to reply. I was true...The blood rushed to Natasha's face and her feet made an involuntary movement, but she could not jump up and run. The baby opened his eyes again and looked. "You're here," he seemed to say and again lazily smacked his lips.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2007.Kindle edition, location 26955