What Falls from the Sky: How I Disconnected from the Internet and Reconnected with the God Who Made the Clouds

by Esther Emery

I was tired, tired, tired of the pace I had been keeping—as a career woman and a mom and a person—and for half of it I blamed my screens. I felt my social networking might be crossing some kind of boundary into addiction. I felt all my interactions might be tainted by some shade of the inauthentic. I wondered if I was doomed to spend the best years of my life having stupid arguments in comment threads.

If I am going to be spending this much time with myself, some things about me are going to have to change. I’m going to have to be nicer. I’m going to have to be more disciplined. And I’m going to have to be more interesting.

In the last few months before I dropped off the Internet, I had come near to living a wholly electronic life.

The Bible isn’t the only thing I’m reading. Books are everywhere in our little apartment. There are books in the kitchen, books in the living room, books in a tall stack on my desk until it falls over and scares the cat. I am reading cookbooks. I am reading parenting books. I am reading a hardback called The Call of Solitude. I am also reading Lemony Snicket’s Unfortunate Series of Events.

would like all this change, and also I wouldn’t. What I’d really like to do is get back on my social networking and waste a hundred hours a week and not feel any responsibility for any of it—not for my lifestyle, or my financial freedom, or the health of my soul.

tell Dolly I’d like her to see Mount Auburn Cemetery. This is New England’s oldest garden cemetery. I do want to show Dolly the place, which is one of the most beautiful places in greater Boston, the sort of place where you can feel the cycles and patterns of the seasons all contained in something deep and true and enduring. But in truth, I absolutely must go to the cemetery today because if I have another conversation with one of my neighbors, I will die. I must take my gregarious sister

But there are still people walking around, even right beside me, who operate in the other reality, where life is not pixels. Instead it is … what? Simpler? Quieter? I still don’t know. I can’t change what I am made of.

How do I really feel about the Internet? Do I really think it’s making me feel trapped and stupid and self-obsessed? Or did I just want to take a break from it so that when I came back I would be really super extra popular? I may have talked about spiritual growth and awakening and transformation, but my end goal was always a blog that gets ten thousand hits a day. My end goal was always validation.

1. I’m cooking. Real food. Using real ingredients. 2. I’m gardening. 3. I have read and completed forty-six paper books. 4. I am going to church. 5. I have read almost the entire Bible. 6. I am vegan. 7. I have more sex. 8. My husband and I have written and are following a debt-end plan. 9. I have letter correspondence with half a dozen friends, including my husband’s grandmother. 10. It is a regular part of my daily routine

that I look closely at a tree and watch the dawn break over the waters of Dorchester Bay.

two Western girls looking out at the tepid and passionless Atlantic, and we talk about how lonely we so often feel. We talk about how weird and crazy it is that this loneliness could happen in the heart of our most vibrant cities—Boston and New York—that anybody could feel so abandoned and so alone. And yet we do. And we’re not the only ones. So many people speak of this and feel this in our strange time. It is the era of hyper-connected isolation.

I don’t understand this. I don’t understand why people put on silly suits and try to conquer silly obstacle courses. I don’t understand who paid for the construction of that set, which cannot by any stretch be named either useful or attractive. And I certainly don’t understand a fatal diagnosis. Who can believe that we are actually, someday, going to die?