By Emily Joy Allison-Hearn, ENHE Board Member
When I’m not teaching yoga in Nashville, I travel quite a bit. This means I get to spend a lot of time in airports, on planes, on buses, on trains, and basically every other means of transportation humans use to get around! My favorite place to read a book is on an airplane, for so many reasons. It’s a great way to pass the time, and it helps to have something to focus on other than turbulence and crying babies. But I also realized that one of the reasons I do my best reading on an airplane is because of the lack of distractions.
On an airplane, there’s no text messages coming through every five minutes. I can’t mindlessly scroll through Facebook or Instagram, or spend the time tweeting my thoughts. Sure, I could play another round of Candy Crush, but it gets old quickly. It’s way more fascinating and fun to get lost in the world of a good book.
That got me thinking about how hard it is to create that distraction-free environment in our everyday lives. In the course of writing the above two paragraphs, I stopped and did at least a half a dozen other things on the Internet! The Internet is a great resource and a wealth of knowledge, and provides us with a whole new way to read and learn about all kinds of things. But it can also be a big distraction and a significant time thief. I can’t count how many times I’ve sat down in my own living room to read a book and ended up distracted by something on my phone or computer!
My resolution moving forward is to read like I’m on a plane more often. No distractions, no texts, no scrolling. It’s easy to do, because all you have to do is put your phone on “Airplane Mode”!
What’s your favorite place to read? How do you minimize distractions while reading? Let us know in the comments below or on social media, and be sure to use the hashtag #LiteracyIsJustice when you post!
When I’m not teaching yoga in Nashville, I travel quite a bit. This means I get to spend a lot of time in airports, on planes, on buses, on trains, and basically every other means of transportation humans use to get around! My favorite place to read a book is on an airplane, for so many reasons. It’s a great way to pass the time, and it helps to have something to focus on other than turbulence and crying babies. But I also realized that one of the reasons I do my best reading on an airplane is because of the lack of distractions.
On an airplane, there’s no text messages coming through every five minutes. I can’t mindlessly scroll through Facebook or Instagram, or spend the time tweeting my thoughts. Sure, I could play another round of Candy Crush, but it gets old quickly. It’s way more fascinating and fun to get lost in the world of a good book.
That got me thinking about how hard it is to create that distraction-free environment in our everyday lives. In the course of writing the above two paragraphs, I stopped and did at least a half a dozen other things on the Internet! The Internet is a great resource and a wealth of knowledge, and provides us with a whole new way to read and learn about all kinds of things. But it can also be a big distraction and a significant time thief. I can’t count how many times I’ve sat down in my own living room to read a book and ended up distracted by something on my phone or computer!
My resolution moving forward is to read like I’m on a plane more often. No distractions, no texts, no scrolling. It’s easy to do, because all you have to do is put your phone on “Airplane Mode”!
What’s your favorite place to read? How do you minimize distractions while reading? Let us know in the comments below or on social media, and be sure to use the hashtag #LiteracyIsJustice when you post!
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