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On the way out of town, I got the shakes. Well, not the shakes exactly, but I wasn’t a happy pre-camper. My wife Kathy and I had committed to four days away from beeping gadgets, ringing phones, sawing neighbors, the on-demand life. It had been too long since our last immersion in the natural world. We were going on a tech fast.

My laptop, iPhone and iPad stayed home.

“What’s wrong?” Kathy asked, glancing at me.

Maybe I looked like I had eels in my shirt. Tech withdrawal.

We were on our way to a rental cabin on Palomar Mountain, east of San Diego. The cabin was beyond cell phone or Internet reception, or so we hoped.

The winding road led us away from the stucco wastelands into golden hills and blue-gray live oaks. We watched a red-tailed hawk balance on a swaying electric line, and farther to the east, the cumulus clouds on their afternoon ascent. As often happens when we head for the mountains, we literally felt the weight lift.

Kids and adults pay a price for too much tech, and it's not wholesale.

“A growing body of research shows that juggling many tasks, as so many people do in this technological era, can divide attention and hurt learning and performance,” New York Times blogger Matt Richtel writes, reporting on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Experiencing too many “senior moments” lately? “We now understand that this is not necessarily a memory problem per se, but often the result of an interaction between attention and memory," according to Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco.

Getting more music, art, yoga, meditation, weight-lifting—whatever—into our lives can help. But technology fasting while spending time in the natural world may be the most effective antidote.

In the 1970s, environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan began foundational work in the study of nature's healing effect on the mind. Their studies suggested that contact with nature can assist with recovery from mental fatigue and can help restore attention. Meaningful contact with nature can also help reboot the brain's ability to think. And it excites the senses.

Scientists who study human perception no longer assume we have only five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. The number now ranges from a conservative 10 to as many as 30, including proprioception—the awareness of our body's position in space, of where we are. We tend to block off many of our senses when we’re staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.

But unplugging the power strip doesn’t always come naturally, even for those of us who, by nature, love nature. It requires a conscious act and a change of scenery.

This is one reason conservation is so important. These days, unplugged places are getting hard to find. Even some parks and campgrounds now offer Wi-Fi—the theory being that people just won’t get outdoors if they can’t tweet. (Insert bird joke here.) For sanity, what we really need are No Wi-Fi Zones and Phone-Silent Sanctuaries. Especially for people who can't afford a cabin on private land.

As it turned out, wireless signals did reach the wilds of Palomar. Now and then, Kathy and I looked up from our books, interrupted by the sound of a cell phone ringing somewhere in the forest.

Even so, by the fourth day, we were surprisingly calm. Taking a break helped; doing it in a more natural habitat helped even more.

On our last day, we drove to Doane pond at the top of Palomar Mountain. I fly-fished for an hour as Kathy read the last chapter of another book. Then we wound our way back down the mountain, already thinking about our next tech fast.

Analysis Paragraph:
Society vs. Nature is the rejection of societal norms in favor of nature. Nature is believed to be a divisions from the community of people who are conformed to society's thought and opinions. In the article, "Going on a Tech Fast", by Richard Louv, technology could be symbolized as a component of societal norms because it captures and hold hostage people's mindset, leading them to eventually conform to the disadvantages of technology [society] and allowing it to think and make decisions for them. Later in the article, nature comes in and divides an individual from technology [society]. According to the article, nature improves your memory, attention span, stimulates more than 20 senses as well as assists as recovery from mental fatigue and improves the ability of the brain to think properly. In the excerpt from, "Walden", by Thoreau, Thoreau says that he, "learned this, at least, by my experiment", conveying that being in nature and being free from society allowed him to discover and learn on his own, and "advance confidently in the direction of his dreams". Nature, indeed, is an effective way to separate humans from technology, in other words, separate us from the rules nd morality of society.

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Transcendentalism in the Modern Age

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In "Wonder", by R.J. Palacio, a young boy named August "Auggie" Pullman has a face deformity, and faces children and even adults who every time he went out in public and they pointed at Auggie and laughed him. Regardless of this Auggie doesn't let any of that phase him but instead embraces his facial deformity so he sticks out from the rest and is his own individual.

Maybe Your Were Just Born This Way

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"Here's what I think: the only reason I'm not ordinary is that no one else sees me that way."
"It's like people you see sometimes, and you can't imagine what it would be like to be that person, whether it's somebody in a wheelchair or somebody who can't talk. Only, I know I'm that person to other people, maybe to every single person in that whole auditorium. To me, though, I'm just me. An ordinary kid."
"Learning who you are is what you're here to do."

Analysis Paragraph:
In "Wonder", Auggie doesn't let what people think or say about his face deformity bother him or make him less than that of an ordinary kid. In the article, "Self-Reliance", by Ralph Waldo Emerson, he rejects the suggestion of society that, "it is easy to live in the world to live after the world's opinions" ("Self-Reliance"), when in fact, it's harder to live in this world conformed to societies rules because then you can't be your true self, and you are forced to be like everyone else. It is the belief that transcendentalism is the effective use by a human by being an individual which is the belief that man is at his best when he is independent and not a part of organized religions or politics. In the book, Auggie is nonconformed to peoples opinions on how he looks because he believes that he is not ordinary because no one sees him that way. In this instance, Auggie uses what people say against him as an example to be who he wants to be regardless of what society thinks. In the article, the main idea is that we be completely self reliant and independent when it comes to our choices and the way we live our life. By not letting our views and our opinions be based on what society says or not becoming subject to what people say you should do or be is an accurate act of being your own individual and standing out from the rest.

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I depend on me
To be all that I can be,
It's my job to do my best
And not worry about the rest.

Yeah, they can talk
But they've never walked my walk.
I really don't care what they have to say
Because I got me at the end of the day.

I will never depend on you or you
That's not what I was put on this Earth to do.
I will discover and guide myself
And be outstanding from everybody else.

I depend on me
To be all that I can be.
I will always rely on myself
And not the thoughts or opinions of anyone else.

Analysis Paragraph:
The main idea of my poem is about depending [relying] only on yourself. Self-reliance is defined as a human relying on his/her own powers and resources rather than those of others to guide yourself through life and to be able to discover your true self without being influenced by society's thoughts or opinions, but through your own mindset, in which your true thoughts derive. In the article, "Self-Reliance", by Ralph Waldo Emerson, he states that "Whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness". A non-conformist is someone whos behavior or views aren't influenced by society. More importantly, in the article, Emerson talks about how we must discover ourselves and use the, "integrity of our own minds", to help guide ourselves through life. Noting else has more value than the thoughts that derive from your self-made mindset. Just because society says its good, it is our job and duty to explore it to be good for ourselves. We are to rely completely on our own morals because morality of society, "are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs".