Choose a frugal challenge: disconnect

Try it for a day: go without Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or tumblr or any of the other social sites you go to daily.

This is a 1 day challenge and probably most of us have already done this - some intentionally and some not. Maybe when you were travelling you had no access to the internet or, like me, when you visited your grandmother.

How about going without the computer for more than a day ? No email, no browsing? This also may have happened to all of us. Let's consider a further challenge and maybe try 3 days?

Or the big one: Don't use the computer for a week.

This may feel scary to some. My teenage son said taking his computer away would be like chopping off his arm! Quite a vivid analogy. We need that connection with others and we feel we get it from the computer. Teenagers obviously feel this strongly.

Walking or driving in the car, quietly and in solitude, is where I get most of my creative ideas or clarity on something in my life. The same way that going on a holiday helps give a bigger picture on life. I'm with Audrey Hepburn who said I have to be alone very often. I'd be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That's how I refuel.

Will you Disconnect? I hope to do so soon, to walk amongst the trees and reflect and journal and maybe read a book by one of my favourite authors or creative people who I mention here below:

• Carl Jung whose search for an authentic experience lead him into solitude, away from men and events.
• This is to be alone; this, this is solitude! ~ Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
• We are rarely proud when we are alone. ~ Voltaire.
• Without great solitude, no serious work is possible. ~ Picasso
• In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion. ~ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays
• The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. ~ Aldous Huxley
• I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden