HM
Mid Afternoon
I am scrolling through my phone while a Netflix show plays in the background. It is the
new season of a show I watched a couple months ago and really liked. I want to watch it, yet I find myself with an attention span too short to stay focused solely on the show for more than a couple minutes. Scrolling aimlessly through my phone for what reason? Tik Tok presents video after video, useless facts such as Halloween blankets that are now on sale at Target or other videos of baby animals running around on a farm. Nothing that was useful information.
It has already been over an hour and I am still scrolling through my phone. Another
episode of Netflix has already begun playing and I am still fixated on the screen. Currently it is Instagram. I see that my friends from my hometown have begun school as well. Many of them are out partying with new friends from college. It’s been only a couple minutes but my attention span has run out of time. Now onto a game so I can stay occupied while watching my show. I started playing Candy Crush. Little candies burst and disappear, I am on a roll. I must keep playing otherwise the level will be too hard to beat next time I try to play. I have yet to do anything productive with my day, yet it is hard to put my phone down. Finally, I have run out of lives on Candy Crush and my episode has ended, therefore I could finally put my phone down and turn it off.
Early Morning
The sun has just come up, I climb out of my tent before it starts to become an inferno. My
feet are immediately in the soft sand at Assateague Island National Seashore, and the cool sea breeze hits me from the ocean which is only one hundred feet away. The time is approximately 7:15am if I had to guess, my phone is nowhere to be found. I know it’s in one of my bags somewhere but is useless because there is no service out at the national seashore. The sun is warm but not hot yet, the sand is cool from the chilly night but I know that it will be warm in a matter of hours. No one is awake yet. I set my chair up at the top of the dune. The waves are crashing against the shore, mist is flying from the wind and hitting me. It is a beautiful morning. The sand is covered in little footprints from the crabs that were hard at work throughout the night, they dissapear in the morning though. The beach is covered in their little holes where they must spend the day. The pelicans are out diving past the break, there must be a school of fish just beyond the shore. I was very lucky this morning, the dolphins are out too. They must be feeding with the pelicans. Maybe they are always out but I am only here a couple days out of the year to see them. There is a wild horse down the beach in the distance, they must also enjoy the sea breeze, I figure it keeps the flies off of them. I take a big breath and am sad to be at the beach for the last time this summer. It was a very slow morning and a much needed break from reality.
Summary
It is extremely easy to get caught up in a society that is surrounded by large amounts of
information and screens which are made to encaptivate people for hours. The differences in what is learned from spending time scrolling aimlessly through a phone or watching tv compared to spending time in a natural setting is tremendous. Being able to spend time in a natural setting allowed for the slowing down of thoughts to learn more about the natural world and in the beach setting, more about some of the animals that inhabit the island. In comparison, spending an hour scrolling through Tik Tok and Instagram, I got large amounts of useless information that will never be used again or forgotten in a matter of minutes. I really appreciated the opportunity to just slow down and enjoy the chance to take in the information that is absorbed from a natural setting and I was able to realize how much time and information I actually encounter daily scrolling through my phone.