a mind set alight
by soft screens and dull fingers—
where did silence go?
If I could bring back one dinosaur, it wouldn’t be a tyrannosaurus or a long-necked brontosaurus swaying its tail over primeval trees. It would be a quiet one. One we forgot existed. A creature more like a breath than a beast. The kind that disappeared not with fire or ice—but with distraction.
I’m talking about the time before smartphones.
Some people remember it like a foggy memory. Others, younger, treat it as legend. But I remember it clearly. Not as nostalgia, but as a state of mind. A way of being. I grew up in a small Slovenian town tucked between sleepy hills and fields that buzzed in the summer heat. We had phones, sure—but the kind attached to walls. With spiraled cords and the weight of commitment. You couldn’t take them on walks or into bed or into your moments of boredom. Boredom had space. It stretched. It grew things inside you.
There was a bench near the end of the gravel road where I’d sit with my grandfather, who had a voice like walnut bark and hands shaped by time. We didn’t speak much. Sometimes he’d point to a distant bird or start whittling a stick with a pocketknife he carried everywhere. I would just sit. No screen. No ping. Just the weight of sky above us and the silent rhythm of grass in the breeze.
That’s the dinosaur I’d bring back.
I noticed the shift slowly. First, it was the emails. Then, the pings. Then, the buzzing in pockets, even when there was no message—a phantom itch in the mind. Suddenly, we were all carrying mirrors in our pockets, asking them: Who am I? Am I enough? Has someone validated me yet?
In Tokyo once, I saw a man cross Shibuya with a flip phone pressed to his ear and a book in his other hand. A real book. Pages fluttering in the breeze. He walked slow, deliberate. The crowds moved around him like water around a rock. He wasn’t lost. He was anchored. I followed him for a few blocks. Not because I needed to go that way, but because it felt like walking behind an extinct creature.
Phones became cigarettes for the mind. We light them out of habit, not need. We inhale notifications, scrolling for dopamine like miners sifting gravel for gold. And like smoke, they fill every space—waiting rooms, bathrooms, friendships. We breathe them in, forgetting what clean air tasted like.
Wabi-sabi teaches that imperfection is beauty, and that presence—true presence—is not polished or planned. It’s the rough edge of a chipped teacup, the slow settling of dust on an old windowsill. It’s the kind of silence that can only exist if you let it.
I remember a woman I once dated in Barcelona. She had a rule: no phones during meals. At first, it unnerved me. My fingers would twitch toward the table where it lay, face down, like a scolded child. But then the conversation would bloom. Slowly, with hesitations and missteps and laughter. One night, she made lentils with orange peel and cloves, and we talked until the candles melted down to soft wax puddles. We told stories not because we had to post them—but because they were alive and trembling inside us, needing release.
When I think of the dinosaur, I think of that dinner.
I don’t want to live in a cave. I love technology. I’m grateful for maps that talk and books that fit in my pocket and music that follows me through cities. But I’ve learned to carve out protected hours. I turn my phone off when I hike. I leave it charging in another room when I read. I take long baths without podcasts. Sometimes, I just sit by the fig tree my father brought back from the Adriatic and listen to the wind press through its leaves. That’s enough.
There was a night in Kyoto, during one of those unbearably humid Augusts, where I sat beneath a paper lantern swaying from an old temple roof. Around me, the world buzzed. But inside, there was stillness. I had no Wi-Fi. No notifications. Just the clink of ice in a glass and the soft hum of a furin catching wind. That moment stayed with me. I wrote it down. Not for a blog. Not for social media. But because it meant something.
The dinosaur isn’t about going backward. It’s about remembering. That deep, slow presence is not outdated—it’s endangered. But it still exists. It lives in walks taken without agenda. In eye contact that lingers. In the silence between thoughts that isn’t filled by a scroll. In the way light falls on a table when no one is trying to capture it.
The wabi-sabi lesson is this: you don’t have to fix every moment. You don’t have to make every second productive. Sometimes, a quiet, imperfect, unshared afternoon is more alive than a thousand carefully curated posts.
Let the dinosaur return.
Let it walk beside you in the quiet moments.
Let it remind you of the weight of your own presence.
If you ever spot it—don’t chase it. Just sit beside it.
And if you’re still here, reading this far, maybe something in you remembers too.
Subscribe, if you like. But not because you’re chasing something.
Because maybe you’re starting to sit still again.
And maybe you’re ready to share the silence.
life 