We’ve asked Karyn Schwartz, owner of the Sugarpill apothecary on E Pine, to contribute to CHS about health and Hill living on a semi-regular basis. If you’re an expert and want to share with the community in a recurring CHS column, we’d like to hear from you.

I love that there are still churches here that ring the time of day, on the hour, with their bells. Whenever I hear them, I find myself longing for the time before digital anything existed. A time when TIME was still analogue, and there was mystery about the everyday ordinary details of life, like what your friends are doing when you’re not with them, or whether or not someone is thinking about you in exactly this moment.

We used to look at the sky to know what time it was. We used to look at the sky just to wonder. We used to sit still and not feel like we were wasting time. We used to listen to records from beginning to end. We used to write letters and postcards by hand and address, stamp and send them, and someone would receive that thought days or even weeks later, and it would interrupt a different moment in time than the exact one when the thought occurred, and a response would be considered, lingered over, signed, sealed.

There is so much to learn by waiting, such joy in mystery, and a tiny but not insignificant thrill in not knowing quite what time it is. There’s such huge potential for actual connection when there remains the necessity to ask questions about someone’s day, someone’s real likes or dislikes, someone’s adventures and heartbreaks and triumphs, rather than already “knowing” from a constant stream of messages and images everything that the people you are connected to have been doing and experiencing. We are not hardwired to carry around all this information in our heads; our eyes did not evolve to stare at a tiny screen inches away from our faces all day. It is making us all just a little crazy, and it is absolutely keeping us up at night.

I said I would write about insomnia, and in my own special way, I am. If you have come to the shop to ask for advice on how to remedy your sleep problems and you happened to talk to me, you already know how reticent I am to recommend anything until we have had this conversation about time, and about technology. You would have been given the assignment to observe yourself over the course of the day, keep track of what you do and how you feel, and most importantly, to put away your technology, even just for an hour a day before bedtime, for one week. I can only hope you understood that I hand out that instruction earnestly. I can be flip about a lot of things, but this is not one of them.

An extraordinary amount of repair happens in the body when one’s mind is at rest, and there’s so much opportunity for healing in the solitude of one’s own thoughts, in the occasional experience of getting lost, and in the privacy of one’s own time away from the madness of constant connection.

Yes, there are many safe and effective herbs and other remedies for insomnia, and I will teach you about them. However, because so much of our difficulty with sleep has to do with what is going on during our daytime, just try this little art project of stalking yourself first, and see if there is not some greater amount of calm in your life from that alone.

Listen for the bells ringing the hour, rather than your phone yelling at you all day long to pay attention to it’s incessant stream of “content”, and look up at the sky, far away, at nothing, at the beauty of just light and dark and endless space.

Sweet dreams.