Back before the internet, when my two sources of interruption were the mailman and the telephone, my computer functioned like a typewriter or notebook, singular in its purpose. A blank screen was a blank page, nothing more. I like to imagine that I could focus then, settling down into a project, losing myself in creation and emerging hours later, but the truth is I grasped for distractions—a hangnail, lukewarm coffee in need of heating, dirty laundry which might as well go into the washer because I wasn’t getting much done anyhow. 

Silent prayer was no different. I imagined I could clear my thoughts, that I could enter quiet like a vast, dark cavern and finally find some peace while really my mind was a first grade classroom where the teacher says, “Today we’ll learn to tell time,” and one kid raises his hand to share, “My brother got a watch for his birthday,” the next says, “I want a Lego set for my birthday,” and the third says, “Once I built a dragon with Legos.” I’ve been a guest author at women’s book group discussions that go about as well, and no wonder:  It’s how our brains work, always chasing the next bauble, compulsively, helplessly. 

Today I know prayer’s hopeless. The best I’ll ever do is see myself thinking and let the thought go. Catch and release. The exercise would seem pointless if the microsecond of quiet following each release didn’t ripple out into the pond of my days. I tell myself, “Twenty minutes, that’s all, and then you can chase each glorious thought to your heart’s content.” Twenty minutes of pointlessness I can handle.

I rise from prayer to my writing desk, where my tool now is also a portal into a vast world of information and virtual relationships and relentless communications—the ideal instrument for a grasping mind. When I focus, dipping into a place of attention and listening so that the house stills around me and I’m fully immersed in creating, there’s always this small, panicky self dashing around in search of a quick fix. An email in my in-box or an alert in Facebook says, “You’re important!  You’re wanted!  Attend here now!” and I do, with an ensuing rush of satisfaction. Here at my fingertips is a tool able to satisfy my every ego need. I can Google anything, including myself. When a question pops into my head so can its answer, with an ensuing boost. Oh, yes!  I’m part of things. I’m not lost in an abyss. If I had a smartphone I could have a hit anytime, which is why I don’t.

After a high like that, my writing project is a historical period I can’t time-travel back into. For the internet mind, contemplation is nothing. It doesn’t link or gratify or have measurable outcomes, at least not in and of itself. Contemplation is like the ever-growing lightyears between objects in outer space. Is there a purpose to all that emptiness? The sheer scale doesn’t just dwarf me; it erases me, and God knows I want to avoid erasure. Maybe that’s what my mind scrambles after—some evidence that I matter.

I know better. Really. My core, present from the start and identifiable in that quicksilver silence after I release a thought, knows better. Or when I lose myself in my writing, the me that emerges afterward knows it’s not only good to be lost but perhaps who I most am. The irony is that, of all the fantastic possibilities the internet offers, it can never free me from my small, addicted self. Silence does. The blank page does. 

This is my contemporary horsehair shirt. I don’t own a smartphone.  Occasionally—“Two hours, that’s all”—I disconnect the wifi. I pray, I write, and while I can’t turn off my internet mind I can notice the internal grasping distractions and repeatedly, lovingly, turn away. Fleeting as that microsecond of release may be, it tastes of grace, and perhaps this is what I long for most.