iTired
I’m staring at a printed blank iCal week with my colored pencils ready to miraculously color code my life into these little boxes with precision. Of course laundry will always happen at the same time every week if I make it purple. And I can most certainly count on my teenagers and 1 year old to offer zero interruptions to my perfectly laid structure. My clients won’t have emergencies, my interns and supervisees won’t have urgent questions, my email will stay at 0 unread messages, games won’t get rained out and rescheduled, no one will get sick, and the dog will stay in the yard – all because I have colored pencils and a master plan.
I then realized, even though lists and color coding are ridiculously fun, I’m wasting more time on another task that will produce nothing I need because I’m still missing the point. What hit me with my iPhone, iPad, iPencil, and all things that apparently “i” need laying all around me is “i” am using the very tools that are enslaving me. Back in the day, kids, I worked in an office with a computer and a phone that did not come home with me. One day I heard about this thing called a “blackberry,” which was this really cool way you could take work home with you. More people got them and took work home with them. I sure did. And at the age of 23 I was in San Diego, CA to run my very first marathon when my boss called me on my “take your work with you anywhere gadget” to let me know I had messed up John Mellencamp’s name in the liner notes of an album (was supposed to be sans Cougar at that point in his career, but I was born in 1978 so I had only known him as John Cougar Mellencamp), and then I spent the rest of my trip and 26.2 miles feeling like a total dumba** for listing a superstar’s name wrong in an album. (By the way, it got fixed – most things do). What if he had no way to reach me immediately? What if vacations meant you could actually be gone from work? They used to. It is harder and harder to draw boundaries between professional and personal time because it’s all in this one or many devices pulling us from one app to another, one relationship to another, one task to another, one post to another, and giving us attention deficits and no way to really be present in any one thing at a time.
And what happened during election seasons when you could safely assume people voted differently from you but you didn’t have to read their shaming memes and posts and then spend hours arguing on a screen with people you don’t even really know that well? I remember there was an argument once in our church about ONE couple who “was voting for that other guy,” and it was scandalous (and I loved them for being the “outsiders” by the way), but that’s as hurtful and dramatic as it got. We still sang “Just As I Am” and went to McDonald’s together afterward.
AND – devices and social media are helpful sometimes. I remember black people and white people couldn’t marry each other in our church when I was a young girl. I never understood this – still don’t. I am thankful for the variety of ways a social platform and more connection to the world is bringing awareness and social justice to places it may have never been seen. There are campaigns to raise money for good causes, ways to see your family and friends’ photos, and more connections and marketing for building businesses. So it’s hard to completely hate on our technological devices.
I just want a way to be back in charge of my life, my joy, my schedule – the boundary before these portable devices was that they only stayed in an office or in one place in the home where you waited several minutes for that AOL connection to let you know you were “on.” What if I can somehow do that now? And what if we use them for the good of ourselves and others? What would it mean to put those boundaries back in place? Is it even possible? What would it look like to make work hours for work and personal hours for personal - AND IN THE MIDDLE OF A PANDEMIC while many are literally working from home? And even if I try to do it, others may not. And then am I left out? Will I be forgotten?
I’m actually bringing my colored pencils back out.
