It’s not even time to “fall back” but I’m already dreaming of our first snow day in Virginia.  I revel in the permission a snow day grants.  Permission to stop adhering to the schedule, to take a pass, to stay home and off the roads, to make cookies in the middle of the day and nap just because I feel like it and I can.  I could give myself this kind of permission more often, but it’s harder when there’s nothing external forcing my hand.  This is the beauty of a snow day, when permission to be takes precedence over the obligation to do. 

These days I sometimes go online during a snow day, if we still have power.  It’s fun to see what other people are doing with the unexpected time and space.  But in some respects, staying offline (imposed or by choice) is better.  It helps me stay present in the day itself, with however I am filling it or emptying it.  I have to rely on my own resources.

Back when I did it, studying abroad was like this, too.  It was 1989 and I had barely heard of a fax machine.  I was only able to call my parents three or four times the whole semester.  My main mode of communication with friends and family back home was through letters squeezed onto every inch of the blue, striped aerogram paper which folded up into its own envelope.  I was homesick and spent copious amounts of time in coffee shops writing home while gazing out the window and sipping a café crème.  I’m sure if we’d had email or cell phones or Facebook I would have checked in incessantly and in real time, as today’s study abroad students do.  I often have trouble remembering these students are gone when they’re away for the semester, since I spend just as much time liking status updates from Zurich as I do from across the campus. 

Before Sunrise came out six years after my semester in France and, like a band you stick with over the decades, I’ve been growing up with this story, told now over three movies and decades.  When I re-watched Before Sunrise a few years back, I was struck by the certainty this movie couldn’t be made now.  Both of the young and footloose characters would have cell phones now, through which they would stay tethered to conversations and posts and people time zones away, no matter what ancient city they were in.  When the characters in that first movie meet on a train there’s a long, quiet shot of Ethan Hawke looking out the window at Europe blurring past.  I remember doing that through France, Italy, Sweden, Ireland.  The movement of the train lulling me deeper in thought.  Fabulous plans for the future were hatched on the train and in journals when I was alone and out of touch in Europe.  The whole adventure of that film began out of un-tethered solo travel and that slim, delicious bubble of time before sunrise.  Today, the characters might be so immersed in updating their Twitter accounts they’d never meet – and, if they did somehow strike up a conversation, surely the cell phones would ring and interrupt that lovely lingering night in Vienna.  What was out-of-time but deeply grounded in one place and another person would surely be dissolved, jerked back into splintered time and attention with the ring of a far-off call or the beep of a text.

I know today’s parents and students would never consider a semester abroad without the availability of constant contact.  But some of what was hard and strange and scary and wonderful about the time I studied abroad was precisely how out of touch it felt.  The connections were largely distant and time-lagged.  Letters I wrote took time to make their way into the hands of my friends and family.  My observations were considered and honed before they were shared – or they were forgotten.  The night my train hit and killed someone in Sweden and I missed the next train and had to rely on the kindness of a Danish woman who helped me find a hotel in Copenhagen for the night – that night was experienced without Google Maps or Trip Advisor or Facebook.  I had to be where I was and trust a stranger and try to get a good night’s sleep anyway. 

A lot of my time in Europe I felt small and inexperienced.  Sometimes I felt scared.  And, though I relied on my parents (and asked them to wire money – more than once), I also spent a lot of time relying on my own resources.  By the time I came home I felt changed.

If I’m honest, I wouldn’t recommend students plan study abroad trips without cell phones.  But I do recommend taking technology breaks on purpose – here and abroad.  There are times and places better absorbed without the rest of the world watching.  Like an all-night stroll through Vienna, standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, the birth of a baby, a walk through the woods, or a snow day.  And when one’s not forthcoming, you can always declare one for yourself.  You might even call it Sabbath.