Thursday, September 29, 2022
The average person touches their phone almost 350 times a day, that’s once every four minutes! It may seem harmless to take a work call, when you’re on the beach with your family. It may seem harmless to text someone else, when you’re at dinner with others. It may seem like no big deal to have a Zoom meeting for work, when you’re visiting family during your so-called vacation. A “harmless” glance at the phone while driving has fooled many who have lost their lives. Is always being connected fooling you too?
If you’re old enough to remember when there was nothing to do but be with your friends, to play outside, or to just read a good book, you remember a simpler time. We’ve lost our ability to meander, to explore, to make up games, or to sit still. We don’t write hand-written notes, we don’t snuggle up with a good book. We don’t spend time together because we’re too busy being “connected” to God knows what.
We’ll probably have to disconnect in order to reconnect to what matters. What matters takes time and it always has – that hasn’t changed. What matters will probably require you to slow down, and to put down the phone. What matters will be old-fashioned togetherness, mind-wandering creativity, and undistracted bliss. Shared time; play time; a long meandering walk; an out-of-the blue phone call just to say, “I love you;” or a handwritten note. How simple is that? Reality still matters. Spend some time with it, it’s not lost. Presence is real. You don’t have to always be “on call.” Always being connected isn’t as harmless as you think. Give yourself a chance to be “bored.” It’s what people did for centuries before they had phones, and look at how much they came up with in spite of it!