Escape the Noise!
An Apple Watch, a camper van, and the art of keeping quiet in the desert
Longtime readers won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve recently inherited my dad’s old Apple Watch. It’s become our usual routine—him constantly upgrading to the latest and flashiest tech, while I trail behind like a lost and overwhelmed puppy, begrudgingly collecting his castoffs.
It took me a solid six months to even open the box, followed by another three of dodging his texts about it, before I finally decided to give it a try.
The verdict so far: it’s... fine? I definitely don’t wear it every day—the battery dies way too fast. Getting texts on my wrist might help me pick up my phone less? Maybe? But maybe not.
I do like that it counts my steps, which I know is a dumb kind of measurement, but it’s a dumb measurement that works for me. (I’m a Virgo who loves long walks. Let me live!)
The most surprising data point, though, has been something completely unexpected.
I had no idea the watch monitors noise levels and alerts you when your surroundings get too loud—it’s not something I would’ve thought to track. I’ll just be like bopping along, minding my business, when suddenly my wrist buzzes with an urgent little PSA: “LOUD ENVIRONMENT! LOUD ENVIRONMENT!”
And I’m like, wow, ok watch, you’re not wrong. It is really fricking loud right now.
And it just keeps happening. Like, all of the time.
Inside my house, inside my headphones, inside my head… there is so much noise. The kids (alone!) would be plenty. But then comes the news, the algorithm, and the timeline. The podcasts, audiobooks, tv shows, and playlists. The group chats, the emails, the spam calls, the alerts. The clickbait, the chatter, and controversies.
Everything is urgent. Everything is with a sharp edge.
It’s…. a lot.
But, one unexpected upside of the unexpected Apple Watch alert: the notification actually worked.
It got me thinking more intentionally about noise and quiet. I started to notice just how much of my day is filled with external input—a constant stream of other people’s thoughts, hot takes, updates, and opinions. The ever-present buzzes and pings. The pull to listen, to read, to respond, to keep up. The guilt and overwhelm when I can’t.
So much muchness—and so little room left for peace, for calm, for time and space and… well, for nothing at all.
So I’ve started seeking quiet on purpose:
Leaving my phone (or at least my headphones) behind on a walk.
Cooking dinner in silence (it’s hard!)
Turning off the radio no one is even listening to
“Mark as read,” “mark as played”—everything but the very best and necessary.
Indiscriminately closing all tabs! Just be gone!
Lying beside my son as he falls asleep while trying to not reach for my glowing orb of distraction and doom.
And—in a funny twist for someone with a very love/hate relationship with the internet—last week was actually kind of fun in my little corner of it! My most recent piece went viral (well, viral for me), which was exciting not just because of the numbers, but because it genuinely seemed to help people—and honestly, it’s been the absolute coolest thing, especially as someone still relatively new to this whole writing-in-public thing.
(If you’re new here from that last post—omg hi!! I’m so glad you’re here. And if you’ve been around a while and happened to miss it, feel free to check it out! I’m really glad you’re here, too!)
Because of all that, I was a bit more plugged in than usual—refreshing my email, checking ~the statz~, popping into the comments. But, as our in-house philosopher Daniel Tiger wisely says: it was fun, but now it’s done. And truly, the timing couldn’t be better for a reset.
The school calendar—the one that sets the rhythm for our lives as teachers and parents—just handed us the best gift of the school year: Spring breaaaakkk!
And this year, we’re doing it right. After skipping last spring (the baby was still very much a baby), we’re heading west again—camper-vanning our way through the New Mexico desert, starting with a long-overdue, much-anticipated stop to visit my brother in Colorado first. We are so excited!
It’ll be our third Spring-Break-in-the-desert adventure—our 2022 trip took us zigzagging through Utah, and 2023 was just as incredible as we trekked through Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and the Mojave.
It’s no coincidence that we keep heading back to the desert: it’s where I feel most like myself!
After a day or so, my outer layers start to shed. I feel softer, more open, more at ease. Time stretches out, slow and wide, like the landscape itself. (Is it time that stretches, or just my patience?)
There’s something about the dry air, the sand dunes, the cacti and desert blooms. The reds and purples of the landscape, the wide-open, sparse skies. The smell of sagebrush when you rub a twig between your fingers—we learned years ago to breathe it in deeply and say, “For your health.” (I think it works!)
There’s something about how stark and unforgiving the desert can be, and how that actually feels good. Like it pares everything down to just what matters.
And of course (of course, of course!)—the quiet. It’s so, so quiet.
What can I say—I like myself and my family a bit dusty and sunbaked, ending the night by a campfire, somewhere out in the big vast nowhere, under the desert stars.
I’ll be offline for as much of the next week and a half as I can, and I truly cannot wait. It feels like such a rare luxury these days to be unreachable—to have nowhere to be, no one to answer to, nothing to do. To spend whole days outdoors, from sunrise to sunset. To be with my family. To mosey, to dawdle, to not rush. To carve out even just a sliver of peace and quiet.
I’ll be leaving my Apple Watch at home—and leaving you with a book recommendation, a poem, and a sincere wish that you, too, find some peaceful quiet this week.
Seek it out, even if just a little. It all counts!
Book Recommendation:
There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish by Anna Akbari
What a wild, riveting read. I gobbled it up in a single day.
There Is No Ethan is a real-life page-turner about a catfishing scheme that stretched across continents and over a decade (!), and the three women who joined together to uncover the truth behind it all.
What makes it extra fascinating (and voyeuristic in the best way) is that the entire saga unfolds through digital communication—texts, emails, messages—so the author was able to reference the full entirety of their conversations, complete with actual quotes, dates, and time stamps. I loved that. It made the whole thing feel immediate and intimate, like you were right there inside the tangled web.
It’s the perfect book to pull you offline for a few hours—and also a pretty compelling argument for why you might want to log off in the first place!
Let me know if you read it and what you think!
And now—the real reason you’re all here (lol, or not)—it's Poetry Month!! I have to share at least one poem.
This one feels especially timely and powerful to me right now. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Keeping Quiet
By Pablo Neruda
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
Thanks everyone for reading!
And I’d love to know—how and where do you find your quiet? Please share, if you’d like!
Beautiful poem :)
👍🏼🤗😘