I know, I know. I live in Costa Rica, and the two minutes a day that I post on the socials look peaceful and idyllic — beach walks, sunsets, the occasional iguana regarding me with ancient wisdom.

But the other 23 hours and 58 minutes, I’m still the same me. The butterfly who can never sit still. The woman who worries endlessly about things outside her control, then attempts to control those things more aggressively, and ends up with an upset stomach and an online Mah-Jong addiction that I will not be discussing further at this time.

So today, I made a decision. I was going out. And I was leaving my phone at home.

No cheating. No bringing my laptop either, which is connected to my phone and is therefore just a larger, more expensive way to check my messages while pretending I’m working. Just me. Alone with my thoughts. My beautiful, unmedicated, unfiltered thoughts.

And Dobby, of course. Dobby, our 10-year-old dog who just moved down here after being my mother’s constant companion for the past two years, always comes.

I decided to drive to the Uvita farmers market, about forty minutes away. For the first twenty minutes in the car, I chanted. I was magnificent. Peaceful. Present. I was practically a documentary about myself.

Then I started talking out loud to Dobby.

He needed to hear some things. So we had a one-way conversation, which is the only kind Dobby and I have, and he was incredibly gracious about it. Truly, he is a gifted listener. No judgment, no unsolicited advice, no “have you tried journaling?” Just ears. Big, understanding ears. “Dobby — como el elfo de Harry Potter,” I have learned to say in my horrible Spanglish. He does have big ears.

Around the thirty-minute mark, I pivoted to telling off several people in my life who really needed my guidance. They weren’t there, obviously. I didn’t have my phone. But I am nothing if not resourceful, so I conducted a series of detailed imaginary interventions in which I was both eloquent and extremely correct about everything.

Then — because I have been recently studying bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion — I sent each of those people love and happiness. Sincerely. With true emotion and a smile on my face, I pictured each of them and just flooded them with peace and light and goodwill.

I contain multitudes. I am working on it.

We arrived at the market.

No dogs allowed.

So I went to sit at Café Vivo, one of my favorite spots in Uvita. I had the avocado toast. Dobby had a side of bacon, because he is also working on things but has made more progress than I have. I love Café Vivo deeply, though I was forced to acknowledge, sitting there phoneless, that part of what I love is the WiFi. Which I did not need. Because I did not have my phone. In case I haven’t mentioned that.

Everyone else at the café was an advertisement for consumer electronics. Phones, AirPods, iPads. One man was wearing earbuds and talking into his watch. We are all coping.

My brain, untethered and unsupervised, had by now compiled a to-do list of people to contact that was roughly the length of my arm. And we were only ninety minutes in.

Then I took Dobby to the bamboo forest, one of my genuinely favorite places on earth. On a windy day, the bamboo — some stalks as wide around as a large and confident adult — makes this deep, ancient, wonderful creaking sound. Sometimes there are monkeys.

The bamboo creaked. There were no monkeys.

The only monkeys were the ones in my head, swinging from chandeliers, chattering and playing their little monkey music at full concert volume.

So Dobby and I found a quiet spot and we just... sat down.

And I realized: I was the Buddha.

Not the awakened Buddha. Not the serene, enlightened, post-Bodhi-tree Buddha that everyone has in their garden. I was the before Buddha — the one sitting under the tree while the demons showed up to the party. What Nichiren Buddhism calls sancho shima: the three obstacles and four devils, the forces that appear precisely when you try to do something good, just to make sure you know what you’re dealing with.

I could not get out of my own mind. And my own mind, if I’m being honest, is not a great vacation destination.

And yet — there was also an observer. A Bridget standing slightly to the side, watching all of this with a bemused smile, shaking her head with something that was almost tenderness. “You are such an addict,” she said, and she wasn’t wrong, but she said it the way you’d say it to someone you love anyway.

I let my shoulders drop. I focused on my breath. Thich Nhat Hanh, very simple: Breathing in, I calm myself. Breathing out, I smile.

And it worked.

For approximately three minutes.

But isn’t that a win?

Dobby and I made our way home. The moment I walked through the door I picked up my phone like a cowboy retrieving his sidearm. Turned it on. Three hours. I had made it three whole hours.

And, as I had known in my bones, nothing had happened. No emergencies. Some group chat texts. A meme I’d already seen. The world had continued rotating without my supervision, which it does, every time, and which continues to surprise me every time.

But here’s my takeaway from sitting in that bamboo forest with my monkey mind and my dog and the three merciful minutes of quiet: the phone isn’t protection against the world. It’s protection against me. Against my own thoughts, against the discomfort of not knowing, against whatever that vast and slightly terrifying thing is that waits when everything goes still.

I cannot hold my phone and hold that thing at the same time. Maybe other people can. I’m not that advanced.

I didn’t get enlightenment. But I got a wake-up call, and I wasn’t even carrying my phone.

Tomorrow, maybe four hours.

And in dog years, Dobby says, that is like a whole week.