5:00 pm on a Friday afternoon is a great feeling. Especially when you have a weekend of fun activities planned! Most of all, the feeling of sleeping in until at least 10 am is priceless.
In the excitement of leaving my office and transporting a fixed computer, I lost my phone. I realized about 30 minutes into my Friday night that my phone was either in my friend’s car, in my car, or lost on a sidewalk somewhere. The feelings of abandonment overcame me, and suddenly I felt naked. No phone! What will I do without it? I couldn’t call my friend to ask her to look in her car, and even worse I didn’t know her number by heart as its stored in my phone.
Fortunately, my Android phone is set to sync my Gmail contacts. I had stopped by another friends house to visit on the way home, so I hopped onto her computer and logged into my Gmail. I quickly sent a Gmail text to my hubby so he would know that I am barren and contactless while I visited my friend. Then, I wrote down my friend’s number, and (gasp) used a LAN line phone to call her! After a few phone calls back and forth, she gave me the bad news that it wasn’t in her car.
An hour or so passed, and the thought of my hubby not being able to get in touch with me kept creeping up on me. I decided I better go home and check on everyone, before I went back to visit for my Friday festivities. Of course, everyone was fine at the house, in fact, they hadn’t even tried to message me. I was very tempted to take my hubby’s phone with me when I went out again, but I realized it would be pointless for him to not have any sort of phone at our house. (We turned off our LAN line years ago.)
So, I lived without it. I realized the phone was probably still sitting at my desk in my office. No biggie. I thought about going to check on it, but the thought of going into the office on the weekend, wasn’t very tempting.
As the weekend progressed, I felt ‘free.’ Free from worrying where I put it, checking to see if I got any messages, playing a random game here and there, maintaining its charge, etc. I didn’t call anyone on my husband’s phone either. I embraced the feeling of being without it. I played with the kids outside. I worked in the garden without music plugged into my ears via my Pandora app. If someone wanted to talk to me, they would have to physically come to my house, or get in touch with my hubby. (He is now my newly appointed secretary!)
The freedom from this experience taught me how dependent to our phones we have become. Remember the days when…you left the house and didn’t worry about carrying so much technology? When you could truly be unreachable for a period of time, and no one worried about you? When you could drive across the country without a cell phone, only to stop at a payphone a couple times on the journey just to tell your Mom & Dad that you were ok? When you didn’t text everyone that you knew, just random forwards or one word blurbs, but actually spoke with them days later?
We’ve become so over connected. I urge everyone to take a ‘phone fast’ for a weekend. Plan it in advance so your loved ones are aware that they need to come by your house if they want to talk to you. The experience is eye-opening and will open up your life to a weekend of intense relaxation!
Oh, btw, the phone was happily sitting next to my office keyboard on Monday morning. It looked relaxed and glad to have had a break too.