Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Intentions

Untitled I have good intentions...don't we all. I will exercise every day. I will go to bed early, eat healthy, drink less, write more, be kinder to my husband, walk my dogs every day, work, work, work, read more, knit more, sew more, craft more, write more personal notes, call old friends, blog more, read blogs more, etc. etc. etc. And that is what I expect of myself before lunch time. It is overwhelming. Where do we draw the line? Is my cell phone for everyone else to reach me? Or is it a tool for me to use to make my life easier. Am I required to acknowledge and respond to every email I receive or can I ignore the more obnoxious ones? I never used to have this feeling of so much left undone. Our's is a world of possibility. You can call or text anyone at any time. You can shop anywhere in the world day or night on the internet. You can post pictures to the world. You can make the perfect playlist and share it with the world. You can cook, photograph and share the perfect weeknight meal with the world. And so many people do all of those things that sometimes it feels as if we should all be doing them. I think I am going to give myself permission to step back in time 15 years when I feel like it and unplug from the world. I can send some old school photos and a handwritten note to a friend. I can let my cell phone die for a day and pick up the land line to call if I need something. I can make a non organic, un-photographed meal that I eat in front of the T.V. with my kids and no one is the wiser. I can ignore email, texts, tweets, blogs, podcasts and voicemails...just for a day. And all before lunch.

2 comments:

Jaana said...

Oh, love this....of course, I'm trying to fit a million things in during naptime (which also means procrastinating alot of things), so I saw this seconds after you posted it!!! I am going to un-connect tonight! Sounds so good! I'm going to use my sleep app to help me go to sleep before midnight. I'm going to wake up well rested....Yes, good intentions. Love you Liz!

tonda said...

In the category of "everything seems greener" I will say that I am not sure we can go back, as appealing as it may sound sometimes. My Blackberry just died one day, no warning, just suddenly nothing worked except the W and Q keys. That's it. By day's end when I took its sad little body to Sprint for help, it could do nothing but powerup.

The latest and greatest, the new Q10 is scheduled to come out sometime this spring, so the Sprint rep convinced me to just transfer to an old phone if I had one and wait for this new modern miracle. I think he saw my 6 year old BB Curve and didn't dare put me into anything with a potentially short shelf life. So I took his advice (after much angst), found an old flip phone and had them transfer over contacts. Sadly, the flip phone only held the first 300 of my contacts which got me to "ja". Even my husband didn't make the cut.

My whole life was in that Blackberry, my contacts, my calendar, my notes to myself. I kept the now dead except its brain BB on life support, charging, and tried to limp along with a phone that was just a phone. The phone couldn't email, couldn't text - well, efficiiently anyway because you had to tap the #7 key four times just to type a single "s" - I couldn't check friends Facebook pages or update my own status. I couldn't use GPS to get me where I needed to go, I couldn't google to find out the nearest Starbucks when I was outside my usual haunts. I was a girl lost!

I eventually gave in and bought a used BB Curve off Amazon, same make/model as my old one, except dark grey instead of red (sort of pretty I now think). It functioned exactly the same, well after they transferred ALL of my contacts from the brain of my dearly departed. I had made it, I was back on the grid! And it was the worst two weeks of my life in recent memory. Just ask my poor husband who had to listen to me moan and cry.