As we cannot easily turn the clock back (and don’t even get me started with daylight savings time tonight), some of us find ourselves bloated from a high-pixel diet of infinite information and over-connectedness. From thirty-somethings to middle schoolers, the passive/aggressive addiction to computers, video games, cell phones and ipods is pervasive (as evidenced by a crowd of friends walking and texting at the same time).

For us in mid-life, we’re fortunate to know first-hand what it’s like to have little or no electronic distraction. Granted, we were kids, but many of us can remember spending quiet, often involuntary time with a book after being denied extra TV time.

But back to the present. If you don’t want to immerse in the medieval art of book reading, there’s always a newspaper or magazine to graze on. If you own one or more oversized coffee table books, with spectacular photos of the natural world, kick back with one of those, on a rainy Saturday (like today), unless you have a blog post to complete. There’s all sorts of print media to enjoy, from the back of a cereal box at breakfast (granted, an underutilized medium – should be a showcase for short story writers), to hardware and gadget catalogs in the bathroom (where using a laptop is just not right) to standing at your mailbox in your bathrobe and sorting through your paper junk mail.

My roundabout point is that print is the perfect means to escape electronic tyranny. New York Times columnist Mark Bittman wrote about the “secular sabbath” in a recent article but really he’s talking about a regular technological retreat, where you avoid the internet, email, cell phone and maybe even your ipod (and I’d include your TV’s translucent, on-screen menu). That fine if you’ve a need to play complete information ascetic, but if your leisure time includes welcoming news or new concepts, then print might be your savior. Even at work there’s opportunity for respite. Put your dirty feet up on your even dirtier desk and spend time with a well-crafted brochure, one without stock photos, one that doesn’t treat you like an idiot, one that a designer like me sweated over, busting my stones to keep you from cartwheeling it into the trash before robotically turning to your keyboard for googled results.