I heard on a podcast recently that if you give up coffee for a month, you’ll experience an almost ecstatic reaction to the caffeine when you drink it again. I’m a little bit skeptical, mostly because I’ve cut heavily back on caffeine as a part of Lent in the past, and certainly did not turn into Bradley Cooper in “Limitless”. Then again, I continued drinking it on Sundays, so perhaps that didn’t count.
In any case, even if it were true, I think I’ll just have to live without these powers. I’m afraid I just enjoy the taste, the (very slight) hummy feeling in my fingertips, and even the little ritual of my morning coffee too much to give it up long-term without a very good reason!
I am a little addicted to caffeine, it’s true, but it does not touch the hold that my other addiction has on me. It’s one of the most boring of all addictions. Hey, maybe you have it too.
My stupid phone.
My iPhone, the little black rectangle of anxiety and stress and wasted time.
I wish getting rid of it was as easy as getting rid of coffee, I really do. I love my coffee. It’s fantastic. I’d be grumbly for possibly weeks, especially if I had to quit cold turkey and deal with the headaches. But at the end of the day, I would only have to go through my day without filling up the coffee machine or making my way to a Tim Hortons.
My phone is not like that.
It’s there to wake me up in the morning, because the last time I had the brilliant idea of breaking my phone addiction the alarm clock I bought was terrible, especially since I usually use multiple alarms.
It’s there to check emails,.
It’s there to see how my little crypto account is doing (consistently mediocre).
It’s there to check the weather.
It’s there to play the music for my son’s homeschool curriculum (fortunately, I intentionally picked one that’s 99% offline, but still).
It’s there to text a friend to see if she’s going to the park.
It’s there to add to my grocery list.
It’s there to “read” in the dark, when I don’t have a Kindle book on the go, but the baby is sleeping.
It’s also there for all the stuff I can more easily just not do, like reading news or scrolling on social media for hours or reading posts motivating me to blog or write or do some other positive thing instead of actually doing it.
I’ve gotten okay at getting rid of the latter stuff. I put the phone down, and I’m okay. I cut my social media use by at least 90%, maybe more. I don’t obsessively check emails. I don’t watch Youtube for hours on end. And I *usually* limit my news intake.
The hardest part is all the stuff that helps me to justify why I still have a smartphone. Taking a note before I forget what I was thinking, opening a web browser and finding the answer to some thought straight away, answering a math question in a hurry, all of that. All of that moderate, reasonable stuff is what ensnares me before I end up binging on the stuff I can just not do.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken the Lenten coffee approach. For the moment, I am not ready to give up my iPhone. There remain some things I genuinely need *some* kind of phone for, so I’m wary of buying some dumb phone and still ending up back on the rectangle of doom. I need to eke out new systems. I need to find a cute watch. It’s surprising how often a mother of young children needs to know the time.
As imperfectly as I may be tackling this addiction, I have whittled away at the “justifiable stuff” because it’s not justifiable. It’s that stuff that’s making me miserable. It’s the stuff that’s ruined my attention span since I was a teenager.
It’s all the glowy promises of the technological utopia I grew up into, in ruins.
It’s the stuff that took away my magic powers, powers I possessed all through childhood – the power to read slowly, to look at leaves, to write, and to write my grocery lists down on a piece of paper. Most of all? The power to call to mind the presence of God, and to rest in silence long enough to listen for His gentle voice.
There is no ecstasy here. The battle is continuous, it is something I have to face most of every day. On the days when I mess up first thing in the morning, sometimes it’s very bad. I find myself wasting most of the afternoon in the mire.
But my powers are coming back.
It’s slow, and sporadic, and interspersed with self-loathing, but I can feel it. Things are getting better. I can feel myself becoming more whole, from the inside out. I can remember what it was like in even the early 2000s, when I enjoyed using the computer, and it didn’t follow me every moment of every day. I’ve read books and just fallen into them like a cozy pile of blankets, content and calm as I take it all in, drink it in. Slow. No, not slow, I still think and read and talk viciously fast.
Unhurried.
That’s the magic so many of us have lost. The magic of a heart unhurried.
