Losing Signal, Finding Sovereignty (Productive Flourishing Pulse #510)
Disconnecting from the noise is easy. Staying disconnected is hard.
"Glacier National Park doesn't have any cell coverage and there's not going to be WiFi in the lodge, either. Is that going to work for the weekend?"
There was a lot underneath Angela's report and question. In most of our recent camping and travel adventures, I'd been integrating work and nature time. That's partially how we've been able to see and do as much as we have over the last two years.
But since our last trip, I'd been investigating the cost of the juggle. In my ideal world, I'd update the principle I shared in 2009 in What We Gave Up When We Gained Abundance: when in nature, minimize clock time and get as disconnected as possible. National park visits are especially catalytic for me if I allow myself to sink into them.
So not only would the lack of cell and WiFi work for me, it also made seeing my intention through so much easier. My devices wouldn't have a job, so I could turn them off and put them away for a few days. Powered off, out of sight, out of mind — which means my attention and wonderings would be focused on being present and experiencing the awe in front of us.
I replied, "That's a feature, not a bug. Almost everything I need to do can wait until Tuesday anyway."
After doing a video session and coordination from the Coeur D'Alene library Thursday afternoon, I put my devices in the work backpack I brought. My cafe bag had my FreeWrite Traveler in it since that's what I journal on. If an idea or reflection hit me, I had everything I needed.
Given how little I knew about Glacier National Park, I was fully ready to experience whatever it offered.
Saturday morning, Angela looked over at me, a bit puzzled and surprised.
"I'm actually able to connect to the WiFi at the lodge."
Saturday's small chance of rain had turned into a long rain starting Friday night. Angela was trying to get an update on the weather and figure out what we were going to do for the day.
The WiFi update came before I had meditated and really woken up. The combination of the sound of rain, a rushing creek, a mist cloud hanging over Lake McDonald, and my body's reminder of the longer-than-expected 6-mile hike the day before made lounging and sleeping at the lodge sound like a great way to spend the day.
Reading Angela's energy, though, I felt my lounging day at the lodge vanish instantly. She was determined to get out, rain or shine.
I noticed a sinking feeling that I misattributed to having to get out in the rain until I looked at my phone. Mentally and energetically, I had made my phone a glorified iPod that had meditations on it since that's all it could do.
I felt the weight of email, Substack, idea capturing, headlines that end up in my attention space no matter what I do, and random liminal grazing as I waited on whatever Angela was doing. Staying up too late because I checked something at the end of the day, fiddling, the whole nine.
It hit like that Macklemore line from “Lost / Sun Comes Up”:
🎵 Scroll. Refresh. Turn it off. Now do it again. That’s the dance now.
(Explicit lyrics. My mom reads the Pulse. Hi Mom!)
That was not what I wanted to be doing anywhere, but especially not at Glacier National Park. I had reclaimed my cognitive sovereignty without having to inhibit habits and patterns.
And since Thursday’s device shut off, I had been contemplating the question of “if this was a vision quest, what would my journey be?” Questions like that are a way of goosing myself into a sacred play space. A common theme in vision quests is considering what you want to leave in the quest and what you want to take from the quest.
The sinking feeling thus not only triggered the burrito in the bathroom feeling, but it also instantly made it clear that my habit of being connected to internet noise was something I wanted to leave with the glaciers, forests, waterfalls, and rivers.
On the one hand, I knew that the only thing that had changed in my relationship with my phone was that I now knew I could have access to the internet. It was available at the lodge the whole time, but I never thought to check. In theory, I could just go on as if I didn’t have it.
On the other hand, habits and muscle memory were working against me. Just touching a tool primes our brains to use the tool the way we always use it. The inverse of “out of sight, out of mind” is also true: in sight, in mind. I’d push it further to be “in hand, in habit.”
Every time we touch smartphones and tablets, we’re battling armies of attention engineers pirates and algorithms that keep us unconsciously touching, scrolling, and buying. Losing hours of the day looking at a screen isn’t an accident. It’s the design.
And it’s not just looking at a screen that’s the real problem for me. It’s how much of the day I’d end up thinking about and feeling what I’d read or seen.
I had lost my easy disconnection and pattern interruption, but I wasn’t powerless.
Because my morning meditation routine (including listening to meditations on my phone) was an important part of my staying in the present/sacred space, attempting a device-free routine would probably throw me off for the next few days. So I ruled that option out. I had also ruled out removing all of the distracting apps from my phone because that would be more likely to get me into messing with my phone. I would’ve done that prior to going to Glacier National Park, but I didn’t think I needed to.
It thus came down to touch and transitions. If I limited how much I touched my phone and was especially careful to interrupt physical and thought patterns in transitions, I could do what I needed and wanted to do without getting sucked in.
My phone’s home screen is set up so that it only has the apps relevant to my morning routine, so that limited how much swiping and touching I needed to do. I finish my morning quiet time by journaling on my FreeWrite Traveler, so I couldn’t just “fall into” grazing. And we had just enough daily adventure prep that needed to happen right after our morning quiet time that it’d keep me busy while I waited on Angela.
So in actuality, it amounted to three choice moments following my journaling for the next three days. I put my phone away before I transitioned to journaling because at that point, all I needed to control my phone was my AirPods. When I was done journaling, I could take my AirPods out and put them away since they also didn’t have a job until the next day.
That was the plan, and it worked. I’m a few days back home and still haven’t gotten back into the old bad habits yet. It seems like the habits may remain with the glaciers, forests, waterfalls, and rivers, if I let them.
And maybe that’s one thing the quest revealed: not what I needed to do differently, but what I was unaware of and ready to leave behind.
~Charlie
Take a Moment
Sometimes what feels like “signal lost” is actually self found. What parts of yourself might you find if you lowered the noise around you?
We’d love to hear what’s coming up for you.
Lower the Volume
Release the distractions that scatter your attention to discover the parts of yourself that have been waiting to be found.
Our July Events
If you missed our LSS yesterday, we’ll have a recap available soon.
And there’s still time to join us for the MMC next week:
Monthly Momentum Call (MMC): Wednesday, July 16, 2025, at 11:00 am PDT
Navigating the Summer Paradox
Your calendar looks lighter, summer promises slower pace, yet somehow you feel busier than ever. Learn to maintain momentum on important projects when your usual structure dissolves and energy shifts week to week.
Not a paid subscriber yet? Now’s a great time to sign up and join us for one or both of these monthly gatherings.
Not that I want you to struggle Charlie, the fact that you do (and that you're human!) is of great comfort to many of my struggles! Thanks for breaking down the process of discovering the goal of the quest.
I appreciated the focus here on leaving a habit rather than taking up or building a new habit. Of course, dropping a habit is not totally passive and required real intention but was worthwhile effort. https://www.hctra.it.com