Secular Sabbath

Yesterday's New York Times Style Section featured a very interesting article titled . Mark Bittman, a chef who incidentally lives in my hometown (I never pass up the opportunity to name drop), wrote about the concept of a Secular Sabbath . The idea here is that you choose a day or weekend where you disconnect from all media. Phone, internet, blackberry, TV, etc. It's a hearkening back to the day when people actually took a Sabbath. It's important to note that there are many people who observe a religious Sabbath like this today.

So, this got me thinking. What if there was one day a week I disconnected? I could maybe do it on Sat or Sun. My work precludes me from doing it during the week. But the weekend is when I like to catch up on my blogging and my friend's blogs and check Facebook and help my single girlfriends screen men on match & jdate? That's a good deed right there. But then I thought about not having to log on and get sucked into work or inane gossip that sadly makes up a lot of my leisure time. So, yesterday afternoon I tried a mini Sabbath. Around 3pm, I had this incredible urge to log on to my laptop. Like a junkie, I always promise myself just a few emails and I'll log off. But it never ends there. It turns into 3 hours of checking email and then I am sucked back into work, 15 hours too soon. I resisted however and sat down with the rest of the paper. (There was also a very enlightening article in the magazine that I might blog about soon.) I proposed a Secular Sabbath to CityCrab who had the same initial reaction I did. But we decided to try it once, sometime in the future. When it's convenient.