Hello Everyone and happy Monday.
Last Wednesday, as I was walking down the street around 18:00, I went to press send on my last email of the day, when an electric bike seemed to swoop in from nowhere and snatched my phone from my hand.
My body went into fight/flight and I started to run after the cyclist shouting
“no”
“stop”
“no”
(which in hindsight, was quite freeing and felt very connected I have to say, thanks to listening to my emotional impulse).
However unsurprisingly, the cyclist clearly didn’t read me as all that threatening and within 10 minutes, had successfully turned off the phone, removed tracking and I was phone-less.
I want to preface today’s post by saying I am in an exceptionally lucky position where I was close to my home so knew how to get home to other devices such as my laptop, meaning I could erase/ cancel and block all the things I needed to so as little harm was done as possible.
I also feel very lucky that while the incident was violating and oddly intimate, I wouldn’t say it was a scary or threatening one.
Because of this, I found myself the next few mornings feeling lighter.
I had a very valid excuse and reason to not reply to every message as quickly as I could.
I had a reason to not be checking a screen every 10 minutes.
I had to be more intentional with little things such as filling out a paper register for my classes rather than the digitalised computer automation system.
And all of this truly felt quite nice.
I often ensure I schedule some time away from the screen, whether that be reading or on holiday. But to go to work for two days and see that nothing went wrong in the slightest due to my not having real-life contact time with notifications, was a blessing.
I (very importantly) realised that I’m not as important as my ego thinks I am.
Everyone who came into contact with me could wait at least a couple of hours till I was available to get back to them.
Now I am back with a working phone, I’ve vowed to only keep certain notifications on during a certain time block.
I want to continue enjoying a more silent, less interrupted schedule where my phone is not vibrating every 30 seconds about things that can wait.
And hopefully, all of this has come just in time for the sun to start emerging again here in London… I challenge you this week that if you haven’t already, see what happens if you too turn off notifications/ turn off your device completely for larger time blocks and see how you manage.
Bring on a notification-free Spring!
M x
Great insight as always Molly. I come from a generation where for the first three years of my life I had absolutely no contact with mobile phones or even particularly with laptops. I remember very clearly not having the constant annoyance, distraction and anxiety that is created by the presence and pressure of these digital assistants. Even when I finally got a mobile phone when I was working in the construction industry, it was a brick that was used to make the odd phone call an often got dropped in buckets of cement washed off and then put back in my pocket or even just on the side, it rarely rang and certainly didn't demand my attention in any way at all. The ubiquity of these digital tools combined with their unparalleled ability to mesmerise us means that they are whilst useful they are also potentially dangerous, by cutting us off from the present moment. So definitely periods of digital holidays for as long as possible are both instructive and freeing!