Busyknitter

Thus endeth my lenten internet fast.

It’s been an interesting ride.

A couple of things happened early on which made it vey obvious that I couldn’t in all conscience step away from my online life completely. I’d always planned to keep track of emails and of course I have to use t’Interweb for work. But there has been some serious life and death stuff happening over the past six weeks to people I care about, and with whom I mostly interact online. So right from the start I’ve been bobbing in and out of a couple of important websites.

Jesus was never legalistic, so I guess I should try to not let that sort of thing bother me either.

Which meant I’m not wearing a hairshirt over buying vacuum cleaner bags online. Or that Amazon order.

What I wanted to achieve from the fast was to break my growing habit of eating up time aimlessly by surfing around websites when I know full well that there is nothing interesting to read and I’d be better off sleeping, praying, reading or speaking with a human being who is actually in front of me. And for the first four weeks, I really managed to keep my internet usage down to that minimal activity. I even spent some of the extra time doing all those excellent offline things.

I did watch more telly than usual, which wasn’t really part of the plan.

However, for the last two weeks of lent it all slid rather badly; Daily newspapers, the BBC, Arts and Letters Daily, Spiked! - all my favorite information sites proved too tempting. I did manage to keep well away from The Ship of Fools (in fact I hardly missed it at all), blogs and all the knitting sites.

Normal service is now resumed; except that I plan to keep one or two of the good habits that I tried to instill in myself.

Have I learnt anything? That in the virtual world, some parts of it are more virtual than others. That living on the internet is no different to concrete life in that it’ really is all about relationships (or the lack thereof).