Paper books and digital minimalism: Why I bought an alarm clock this week

This past Sunday, Mike and I went for a walk in the very chilly sunshine. Crunching down a dirt road that runs along the river, we saw one downy and two pileated woodpeckers and heard—or more accurately, jumped out of our skin at—the sound of the ice creaking and groaning in the cold (it really does sound sometimes like a gunshot going off, especially when you’re all of ten feet away from the river staring at a woodpecker up in the trees). The snow on either side of the road and across the river was pockmarked with the trails of all kinds of little creatures, and the sun on our face offset the wind that buffeted us.

It was beautiful, and I have no photos to share it with you, because I did not bring my phone (and I’m still too scared to bring my real camera out into the true cold). I didn’t bring my phone because I’d made the decision the night before to take a good, long break from it.

I am very much in the habit of recording my time outside (zero surprise to anyone who follows me on Instagram). I’ve always really loved sharing photos—I was really active on Flickr as a teenager, and I remember waiting excitedly for Instagram to become available on Android way back when. When the pandemic hit, going for morning walks and taking photos of it became a lifeline as Mike and I tried to figure out how to survive in our tiny Centretown apartment. When we moved to our small town, it became a way to marvel at how much nature I was suddenly surrounded by. I really like sharing little snippets online, and I like looking at what other people share too. Despite the issues with social media—and they are legion—I think that there are pockets of good, and I like nestling into them.

Lately though, I’ve been falling into an old habit of spending hours (and hours and hours and hours) scrolling. This happens periodically, especially when I’m finding life challenging like I am right now. And Saturday, after spending god-knows-how-long stuck in an endless TikTok scroll, I knew things had to change.

I’m not going to bore you with a description of a social media cleanse—that’s kind of boring and not really accurate to what I’m doing besides (except for TikTok, which I deleted entirely). What I’ve decided to implement are lifestyle changes, a shifting in my relationship to digitality. Again, another making of space.

What I am trying to do, at its most basic, is be more present.

I think a lot about slow living, and what it means beyond an #aesthetic, beyond pretty pretty pictures of barefooted women wearing paisley kerchiefs in rustic kitchens making sourdough (too specific? Clearly we have very different Pinterest homepages). And I think that what it all comes down to for me, what it is I’m actually seeking when I talk about slower living, is being present. Finding the activities and moments and blaring, all-encompassing realness that tether me to the world. 

And what that’s proving not to be, at the moment, is the digital world.

Sunday morning, before my crisp walk with Mike, I chose to leave my phone on its bedside charger all day. We had no plans beyond a quiet day in, and instead of defaulting to scrolling social media as I inevitably would the millisecond a prickle of boredom tickled me, I grabbed a book: a real-life paperback book.

For years, I’ve done most of my reading on my Kindle. I really love my Kindle, not least of all because I read a lot of romance novels (ranging from truly literary works to truly trashy, escapist fun). But Sunday I craved the feeling of paper between my fingers, so I grabbed an unread non-fiction from my shelves and settled in.

The book was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a book I have been meaning to read forever. I believe that books come to us when they’re most needed, and as I sat down with Kimmerer’s book and read the first page, I knew it was exactly what I needed. I made it three pages before I had to get up and grab a highlighter to mark my favourite passages. I cried five times while reading. I read the entire 350-page book in a day. I haven’t quite parsed the enormity of my feelings for this book yet, but suffice it to say for now that curled up on my couch, highlighter in hand and no digital distraction to be found, I engaged with the material in a way I hadn’t engaged with a book in years. 

It felt awesome.

Sunday wasn’t the first time in recent weeks that I’ve turned back to the analog. I stopped using Notion and switched back to a paper planner. I pulled out my Polaroid camera. I even bought an old-school, honest-to-god alarm clock so I can kick my phone out of the bedroom and avoid those deadly pre-bedtime and post-morning-alarm doom scrolls. There’s something in me, something that feels kind of like wisdom, pulling me gently away from the screen, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

I’m not becoming a luddite—beyond the fact that I work in digital marketing at a fully-remote company, technology is something I value. But I need to rebalance my relationship with screens, find more moments that pull me out of that virtual world and into the true grit and dirt and cold of a northern January. These small decisions are grounding me, slowing me, helping me connect deeper with the world around me—and isn’t that what I’ve been after all along?

So this isn’t the announcement of a digital cleanse or anything so drastic (except again to you Tiktok: sayonara). But rather, a mindful shift back to slower options in the moments that make sense. Hand-written notes in the margins of paper books, the gradual lightening of Polaroid film revealing a captured image, an unplugged walk in the winter woods.

Until next time.