Touch Grass

There is an odd comfort in knowing that certain expressions, spoken with intent or irony, can cut through the static of our digital age. “Touch Grass” has emerged as a modern idiom, first with a handful of playground anarchists, then radiating outward to anxious parents and looped-in teachers. It is a phrase with the flexibility to shift tones for any occasion, the sort of thing one says with a laugh to coax a cooped-up friend out to the park or tossed across the kitchen table like a dare when a day has gone too long with only the blue-white pulse of a laptop for company.

As with all language that survives, the phrase is a living thing, mutating as it passes from thumbed-out messages to shouted invitations from the base of an apartment stairwell. Some believe it refers solely to the act of pressing a palm to grass or shrub — literally, like a prescription. Still, others spun it as a metaphor: to greet the day, to breathe unfiltered air, to surface from the submarine life of screens and sockets, and see, finally, what the rest of the world was quietly up to.

With astonishing swiftness, the phrase became a habit. Friends texted it to each other as a shorthand for ‘let’s meet,’ or ‘I miss you,’ or to convey that the world is still…