Living without a Smart Phone

Well it’s almost a month now that I have been without the Smart Phone and I have to say that it’s really been a much easier transition than I was expecting, far easier than giving up smoking all these years ago!

I pop it in the same category as smoking as my use of my phone had an addictive quality to it. I found myself checking it just for the sake of it, a little like I might have smoked a roll-up just for the sake of it. It was an addiction that was distracting me from my children and from being truly present to what was unfolding around me.

As I’ve mentioned previously, it is the building up to the letting go that is actually worse than the letting go itself. I had to get my mind used to the idea that I could live my life without a smart phone, which is tricky, because we are increasingly conditioned to believe that we can’t live without a smart phone. But alas we can! We just have to make the shift beyond the conditioning that tells us this isn’t true.

The first few days were strange, because I kept reaching for it, mainly to take a photo. This interested me, the extent to which I was taking photos and my motivation for doing so. I realised that partly I was taking photos for other people, like a show and tell, “look where we’ve been and what we’ve seen” rather than just being truly present to the moment. Social media of course is based on this whole notion of showing ourselves to the world - of fulfilling that need to be seen and heard, which may have been denied during childhood.

I’m not sure its healthy though, to live our life through the lense, of being more concerned with sharing our experiences with others rather than simply living them. I’ll never forget being up at Lukla in the Himalayas, on our descent to Kathmandu having trekked to Everest Base Camp, and my fellow gap year students being obsessed about trying to upload their photos to Facebook. This was back in 2007 and Facebook was relatively new. It was beyond my comprehension. Especially the fact it cost them a fortune, not least in internet cafe fees (this before WIFI) but in the time it took them, which prevented them to enjoy this little town up in the mountains. You can read much more about this in my book Namaste btw.

My Nokia brick phone - “oh look, how cute your retro phone is”, one of my friends said - is painful to use. It took me two weeks to work out how to make a phone call, let alone how to respond to text. Still, it’s been a helpful process, automatically bringing with it better boundaries. People don’t text me so much now and if they do, my response is short and sweet simply because it is too difficult to text more than the basics! This prevents the exchange of unnecessary offloading and sharing and means that we are more likely to meet and talk in person.

It’s also cleared my contacts and the energy that I was previously lugging around with me. I only put people in as contacts if I actually have some contact with them and this is not many - my world has got smaller, and yet richer too!

Maybe I email more now. But I like emailing. I’m a writer. I like to write. So it’s not really a big deal for me. Albeit it is a big deal for others and while I might send ‘catch up’ emails to my older friends who all live off island, very few of them have the time or interest to respond to me - it has made me realise how superficial our friendship had become and how much energy has been wasted trying to hold onto them. So even this has brought with it a letting go and a deeper recognition of the amazing friendships I have made since, here on the island, and the depth of those friendships that sustain that need for deep nourishment that only genuine two-way friendships can provide.

Whether I’ll always be without a smart phone who knows, but for now it is working, and has reduced my stress levels simply because I’m not ‘on call’ 24 hours and nor did I need to be - that was just another illusion. I’m able to switch off further from this crazy world and enjoy more peace in the process. There’s this wonderful poem by Mary Oliver, which keeps coming to mind and which I’ll end this blog post by sharing…

“Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I'm taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.”

Love Emma xx