Season Opener

Last night, at 10:42 p.m. Eastern, summer arrived in the Northern Hemisphere. With it, a major heat wave is affecting large swaths of the U.S. Keep yourself safe and stay cool however you can this weekend. If you can find your way to some water — a pool, a lake or a river, the ocean, your trusty old bathtub — do it.

Not only will you cool off, but you’ll also get the benefit that my friend Lori pointed out to me recently: Swimming is one of the only activities in modern life during which it’s nearly impossible to be on your phone. (Fine, it’s possible in the bathtub. But why are you on your phone in the bathtub?) The ideal of summer, the one that plays in my imagination during the colder months, is totally tech-free. It’s all real life, all sensation: sun on skin, sand between toes, picking the corn cob free of its waxy silk, always smelling something grilling somewhere. There’s no phone in this film, no text message or push alert, nothing vibrating in anyone’s pocket.

My colleagues on the Travel desk have a new story this morning about far-flung resorts where people pay up to $32,000 a night to get away from civilization, to unyoke themselves from the stranglehold of Wi-Fi. This seems extreme. But I still get nostalgic remembering the phone-free week I spent in the woods nearly two years ago, what a relief it was not to have that parallel life to tend to for a spell.

Last week, I wrote about how to find a middle ground between obsession and retreat in the face of what feels like an impossible-to-process volume of information. The solution, as with so many of our persistent complaints, is presence. The phone takes us out of the present like nothing else. I’ve been thinking about the moment when you return, after having been deep in your phone, oblivious to your surroundings. There’s this feeling of dislocation, like waking up. You have been traveling, you’ve been elsewhere, totally disconnected from the world, your home. You have this second where you aren’t sure where you were, as if you’ve lost your place.

You lose bits of your life when you’re lost in your device. You know this, I know this, but somehow, in summer, it seems even more regrettable to miss out on the moment. It’s finally warm enough to linger outside. There’s enough daylight that, on a Saturday, you can get your chores done and still have time to lie in the grass with a book, to contemplate the leaves against the sky. On hot days in the city, you can see and smell the sun acting on the asphalt, refracting in blurry, mineral-y waves. The roses are almost obnoxious in their exuberance. Why would you want to miss a minute of this?

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