The WiFi password was on a card in the cabin. I noticed it the first evening, placed between the welcome flowers and a small bottle of local olive oil. I put it in the drawer. Not out of discipline - I fully intended to connect after dinner. I just forgot.
That forgetting was the beginning of something.
Day one: the phantom vibrations
The first twenty-four hours are the hardest, and the most revealing. My hand reached for my pocket roughly every four minutes - I counted, because I had nothing else to count. The phone was there, but with no signal at our anchorage near Amorgos, it was just a camera and a clock.
By dinner, I had stopped reaching. Not because I had conquered the habit, but because the sunset demanded full attention. It lasted forty minutes. I had never watched a sunset for forty minutes.
Day two: the boredom that isn’t
I woke early and lay in the cabin listening to the water against the hull. At home, this would be the moment I reached for the phone - checking email, scrolling headlines, armouring myself against the day before it had even begun. Here, there was nothing to armour against.
After breakfast, the captain took us to a cove on the southern coast of Amorgos where a monastery clings to a cliff face three hundred metres above the sea. We swam. We climbed. I noticed the colour of the rock - a warm ochre that changed shade as clouds passed. At home, I would have photographed it and moved on. Here, I just looked.
Day three: the shift
The crew had mentioned that day three is when it happens. I did not believe them, but they were right. Something shifted between the morning swim and lunch. The internal narrator - the one that narrates your life back to you, judges it, plans the next scene - went quiet.
I sat on the foredeck for two hours after lunch. I was not meditating. I was not reading. I was watching the light change on the water and feeling the boat move beneath me. If someone had asked what I was thinking about, I would have said nothing. But it was not an empty nothing. It was a full nothing - the kind of presence that meditation teachers describe but that I had never quite believed in.
Day four: different senses
Without the constant input of screens, other senses sharpened. I could smell the pine from the shore when we anchored near Naxos. I could hear the difference between the sound the hull made at anchor and under way. Dinner tasted more complex - or perhaps I was simply tasting it, rather than eating it while doing something else.
My partner and I talked more than we had in months. Not about logistics - who was picking up the children, what needed fixing, when the next meeting was - but about ideas, memories, plans that had nothing to do with productivity.
Day five: the question
“Do you want the WiFi password?” the stewardess asked, gently, over morning coffee. It was an offer, not a suggestion.
I thought about it. There were emails to check. There were probably hundreds of notifications. The world was, presumably, continuing without my input.
“Not yet,” I said.
It was the most powerful sentence I had spoken in years.
What I brought home
I reconnected at the airport. The emails were there. None of them were urgent. The notifications were there. None of them mattered. The world had continued exactly as it would have whether I had been watching or not.
What I brought home was not a rejection of technology. It was a recalibration. I now leave my phone in another room while I sleep. I do not check email before breakfast. I take walks without earbuds. These are small changes, but they came from the sea - from five days of discovering that the world does not need my constant attention, and that I am better when I do not give it.
The WiFi password is still in the drawer of that cabin, I imagine. I hope the next guest takes as long as I did to find it.