#2 : in 358 days, I’m giving up my smartphone…
cactus flower
Know someone who might enjoy the Cactus Diet? Forward it their way.
The mission the goal the challenge the madness of quitting my smartphone—and I’m taking you along for the ride—I’ve decided to call it: the cactus diet.
First and foremost, it’s a diet: a lifestyle change, something you decide to do, that may or may not succeed, but in any case, something you talk about over drinks—oh yes, “I’ve decided to go on the cactus diet.” It’s not always easy, but we do it because we expect improvements down the road—for me, and for the kids, too.
But why “cactus”?
What does this plant have to do with cell phones?
In the central region of Chile where I live, the hills and mountains are teeming with cacti, particularly the one commonly known as the “quisco,” “Echynopsis chiloensis”—an imposing, columnar cactus, sometimes branched, often several meters tall, which, for just a few days in the spring, produces white flowers with long, ribbon-like petals the color of a wedding dress.
One day, as I was strolling through the hills near my home, I was overjoyed: there was a quisco in bloom! What a magnificent creation of nature! I have a wild urge—first to pick it, then, pulling myself together out of environmental conscience, simply to touch it — imagine how soft it must be! Just look at that green tube emerging from the side of the stem, from which dozens of cream-colored petals bursting forth in tight rows! I can’t help but stand on tiptoe, reaching out from the edge of the trail toward this beauty below, to see if these flowers are as thick and velvety as they look, to break through its defenses and brush against that velvet… The cactus towers a good meter and a half above me, but its flower is within reach, right there, almost… Yet, despite the advantage the cliff gives me, I hesitate.
Is this a good idea? Um, maybe.
Is this really a good idea? Um, no.
This cactus is bristling with spines nearly twenty centimeters long, as long as knitting needles, as sharp as pins. If I slip up and fall, I risk getting really hurt, and it won’t be nearly as fun as in Tom and Jerry.
Still don’t see the connection to the smartphone? Still nothing to do with the challenge of breaking my dependence on my phone within 365 days—well, 358 days now?
What made me want to call this challenge the “cactus diet” was the sudden realization that, in the world we live in, giving up your smartphone is, like that day, trying to caress a cactus flower. It’s full of thorns and full of questions:
How do you go about it?
Is it painful?
Is it really worth it?
I don’t know—you skirt around it, you go for it head-on while gritting your teeth, you do the rain dance.
Sure—20 centimeters, after all.
Absolutely: that cactus flower is what awaits all of us who embark on the cactus diet.
The price to pay but mostly a magnificent reward after the hedge of thorns, about which you’ll be able to say over a drink: “It wasn’t easy; it took quite a bit of contorting, but since then, my life has blossomed.”
Translated by DeepL.com and her author