On Wednesday, I went to work without my phone, deliberately. It was a social experiment I wanted to try on myself, just to find out if anything would happen to me if I don’t use my phone for a whole day. My addiction to this device was becoming sickening.
The first thing I noticed when I was about to leave the house that morning (without my phone ofc) was that I felt naked. I felt as though I had failed to put on a final piece of clothing and a part of my body was being revealed, it felt weird to be honest😂
Second to that, my tote bag felt super light 😂😂 it was so funny because I knew what my brain was trying to do to me but I refused to bulge.
I walked out of the house feeling rather excited, I tried to pay close attention to my surroundings so I could write about it in extensive details but alas! I got distracted by an endless loop of thoughts.
I would be lying if I said the air in my lungs felt fresher and better, I mean, I had hoped that this would be the case, but it wasn’t really. But one thing stood out to me, I was happy, really happy to be doing this.
Because I am writing this entry many days later, I honestly cannot recall much from Wednesday. I wish I had listened to the Holy Spirit when he asked me to do this on Wednesday evening.
When I got to the office I was a bit restless, I didn’t really know what to do with myself without my phone, so I slept a lot (when I had no patients of course). I came prepared anyway, I had a book with me, so I spent some time reading the book, when I wasn’t sleeping.
Initially I felt as though I were experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Everything just did not feel right without my phone and I was always checking the time, hoping for it to be 5pm already. However, with time, both my body and my mind settled into my current reality and I began to make peace with it.
But some things stood out to me though. I was kinder to my patients, more emphatic, more patient, and more gentle. I wasn’t in a hurry to get procedures done, because there wasn’t anything to go back to after performing these procedures.
Nothing radical anyway, there was no radical shift in my life or day’s experience, but I’m guessing that’s just because it was my first time. I intend to do this more often as the weeks go by and see how it changes my life, for good, because I know it will.
My true intent for this experiment is for it to become a kind of weekly fast, where I plug out from the digital world and all the noise that comes with it, and plug into God’s rhythm and the peace and solitude it brings to my soul. I won’t say I achieved that on Wednesday, but then again, it was just an experiment to see if I could truly stay away from my phone and it worked, I did it.
Maybe, when next I do this I’ll have something more interesting to write about.
With Love From Wendy 