In episode 208 of her excellent podcast “Simple”, Tsh Oxenreider speaks of the month-long sabbatical she just took. It was a true sabbatical from work but also from social media. She has many lessons learnt from this month, and I recommend listening to this podcast or reading her blog. There was one specific thing that she read in the podcast that caught my heart.

She talks of the need to reconnect to being human. She calls this to “Double-down on being human”, taking the phrase from Jaron Lanier.

Tsh makes a surprising yet beautiful connection between this idea and a paragraph from the 7^th Harry Potter book. If you are not a Harry Potter fan or if you need a reminder, the 7th book is the final one of the series, and by this stage Harry is very much knowledgeable and experienced in magic. He can use magic to make his life so much easier, for many daily, mundane and manual tasks. Yet when one of his friends die (don’t worry I won’t tell you who it is… no spoilers here!) Harry deliberately chooses not to use magic.

“I want to do it properly” were the first words of which Harry was conscious of speaking. “Not by magic. Have you got a spade?” And shortly afterward he had set to work alone digging the grave in the place that Bill had shown him at the end of the garden between bushes. He dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it. Every drop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to XXXX (no spoilers!) who saved their lives.” (chapter 25)

I really loved this short paragraph and the concept that Tsh Oxenreider calls connecting to one’s humanness.

There are days when I sit in my office and see the green trees from my window and wish I could just step outside, replace the constraints of my corporate clothes to some comfortable jeans and a t-shirt and plant something. Get my hands full of soil and seedlings and earth.

There are times when I want to take out all of my art supplies, scatter them across the floor of our living room and make a gigantic picture of something. Mix the paints, feel the textures, get my hands as close as possible to the materials, to the essence of it all. We’ve lost so much of this. It’s so much easier and more clean and sterile to just sit and flick open our variety of screens and suffice with that.

The joy that I see on my son’s face, when he returns from riding his bicycle around the block, or shooting some baskets outside is incomparable to seeing him vegetating on the couch with a screen.  

No, I’m not bad-mouthing technology. I admit and acknowledge the many benefits it brings to our lives. I am only talking about the balance.

We need to be aware of the need to maintain our humanness, our physical connection between us humans, between us and nature. We need to remember to use our hands and our bodies in many ways and to continue to explore the possibilities of this in our lives.