Forced Hiatus

My heart sank when my phone stopped working. It was 8 a.m. on a Monday and I had a whole other day planned, full of organizing, cleaning, and making, but my phone stopped, well, technically, it stalled, and I kind of panicked. 

I tried all the tricks to fix it, tried to get my mobile carrier to help, found out that even though I had been paying nine bucks a month to insure my phone, I would still be paying $150 out of pocket to get a new one. 

I spoke to Apple, whose iPerson sent me on a wild goose chase all over my small town. Then, when I had just about decided to give in and buy a new phone,  a young, earnest man behind a counter in a small, soulless building told me that he could fix it. And within ten minutes, he had. When my phone started working again, the display read 2 p.m. and I had lost my day and a part of my mind in this crazy whirlwind of pursuit.

As I walked out to my car, taking on the familiar crook-necked posture humans are evolving into, it hit me. My phone really controls my life. It keeps me from feeling things I probably should be feeling, thinking things I could be thinking, and most importantly, making things I could be making. I realized in finding my phone that I might be losing my mind.

After all that has happened in the last month, I can see how my life might be telling me to put a bit more emphasis on real-life relationships and interactions, and a bit less on virtual endeavors. 

I realized throughout this day without a phone, as I drove from one place to another in search of answers, or waited for service that would prove to be ineffectual and rude, that I was feeling a bunch of stuff I usually squelch with distraction. I was feeling my feelings, and it made me uncomfortable. 

Feelings, by nature, are there to make me feel uncomfortable, and in so doing move me into some kind of action, and realizing I had been going without that lack of comfort was a bit troubling. Acknowledging that I had been avoiding so much of what normally keeps me awake to the world was profoundly depressing. In this journey to get my phone rebooted, I also decided it was time to get my emotional body rebooted as well.

I have a new strategy with my phone now, and while it was painful to look at how I had been ignoring my feelings, in the end it pushed me to be better about how I spend my moments in between. It's never easy to acknowledge that I have been ignoring some large part of myself out of laziness or fear, but once I get on the other side of it, I'm usually pretty good at doing something about it.

This forced hiatus from technology turned out to be a good thing. So good, in fact, that I just might take that same time every day just for myself. 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. will be all about me. I will feel what comes up, make stuff, think stuff, and live a life of engaged action.

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Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever found yourself using technology to squelch the feelings that naturally arise during the course of the day? Or do you have a coping mechanism to not allow technology to ignore too much of your wonderful life?