Disconnect the Phone

Unplugging

“As you simplify your life the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness, weakness.”
Henry David Thoreau

My Lenten practice for this week is all about unplugging; first, from incessant talking, secondly, from TV, and today from the cell phone. I can feel my anxiety rise just writing that sentence. I have spent many days of my life, unplugged—cell phones didn't exist when I was younger and didn’t work all the time even after they were commonplace. If I blew out a tire on the highway, I simply took care of it, or waited for a kind stranger to come along and help. Never once have I been mugged, robbed or beaten while waiting for help in a stranded car. And yet…the thought of driving without my cell phone leaves me breathless.

When we first moved to Morganton, NC, from Chattanooga, TN in 1955, I was nine years old. Morganton was a tiny hamlet at the foot of Table Rock and Grandfather Mountain. Our telephone was a ‘party line’, so when you picked it up you might hear other voices talking. If someone else was not using the line, an operator came on and asked what number you wished to call. After Chattanooga, this primitive communication system seemed completely archaic to me…and I was sorely tempted to listen to my neighbors’ conversations. Needless to say, I didn’t use the telephone very much. Nowadays, my phone is ever with me. If I forget it, I sometimes drive back to my house to retrieve it. Does this constitute an addiction? Isn’t it the same anxiety that arises in an addict when they are deprived of their drug of choice?

In today’s world, we are addicted to stimulation. When I was a child, that stimulation came from radio and television, which were constantly on in our home whether or not anyone was paying attention to them. It was the background noise of our lives. When I got to college, I realized that I needed silence to concentrate and got into the habit of going to the library to study. No wonder I was not such a good student in high school! There was never silence in my home.
Today that constant stimulation comes from technology, too—cell phones, laptops, internet, iPod, game systems, as well as television and radio. We have many more choices and most of us are only unplugged when we are asleep. Let’s give it up for a day—for just six hours. Who knows what might happen if we could listen to ourselves think, if we were to listen to the birds singing and the wind blowing, if we were to simply sit with ourselves in prayer or meditation? Who knows?

In the spirit,
Jane