What do you plan to do with your one precious life?

Angela Mollard Monday 23 January 2012 1:28pm

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Angela Mollard

FOR a year now, I’ve had a little quote pinned above my desk. Tell me, it says, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

On a particularly joyless day, I scribbled a response: “Make lunch boxes.”

But even doctored with my smarty-pants cynicism, that scrap of paper winks at my soul. Some days, I try for ‘wild’ by blasting The Buzzcocks through my office after dropping the kids at school. Other times, I aim for ‘precious’, tinkering with words in the hope they’ll flow from me to you as naturally as breath (they don’t).

Now, I’m not one for malcontent. Live well, love well, don’t leave a mess and “yes, please” to another piece of cake is generally my motto. But, recently I’ve felt disconnected, which is absurd because last year I received 13,506 emails, sent 432 tweets and became Facebook ‘friends’ with someone I kissed in 1989. I’m so connected that I go online the second I wake up. I’m linked in, favourited, retweeted, liked.

Tech torpor, nature deficit disorder, digital ADHD – call it what you like, it’s fracturing our lives. How many couples spend their evenings on separate devices? How many babies looking up from their prams see their parents’ faces masked by an iPhone? New research shows Australians are less inclined to embrace adventure and try new things, with 80 per cent blaming technology and social networking for their inertia. Add to that the 130 million days of stockpiled annual leave and you get the sense there are a lot of people visiting life rather than living it.

So, this year, I’m going trekking in Nepal. It’s a long-held dream, conjured before children and mortgage and responsibility, and put on hold for more than a decade. I signed up before they told me it would be so cold at night I’d have to pee in a zip-lock bag, and before reading that altitude can affect co-ordination (I’m challenged at sea level).

Sue Badyari, of World Expeditions, tells me to expect to be transformed, to “emerge from the wilderness renewed”, but for now the most exciting thing has been drawing blue lines through our family diary. When you hold the minutiae of four lives in your head, there’s something utterly freeing about scrawling ‘AWAY’ through most of the month.

One of the women I’m going with has nominated this her gap year. It took her a long time not to think it was selfish, but with her first child now through the HSC and three more to follow, she’s taking a moment to enrich herself. Another co-trekker is 18. For her, Nepal is like a line break; a meaningful pause between the paragraphs of adolescence and adulthood.

For me, the appeal is as much nature as nurture. My screensaver is an inky blue mountain iced with snow, wild and precious. It’s time I did more than just look at it.

This article was originally published here and had been republished with full permission.

Angela Mollard is a Sydney-based journalist who began her career at the New Zealand Herald before moving to London where she worked for the Daily Mail. For the past few years she has combined motherhood with writing for magazines both in Australia and the UK. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Is digital technology stopping your from living in the moment?