A Moment of Clarity Amidst an Internet Outage (Day 18)
Who else woke up with a crippling case of the Mondays? After falling asleep way past my bedtime last night, I knew this morning was going to be a struggle. I didn’t even bother setting my traditional 6am alarm. It simply was not happening. Especially after the five hours of sleep I was still recovering from Saturday night. No surprise, it was a struggle. Absolutely no part of me wanted to go to my workout this morning but as I got dressed I told myself it would be worth it. You never regret a workout after all.
I will never cease to be amazed by the impact movement can have on my entire outlook. By the time I got home after my workout and got ready for the day, I was in a completely different headspace than when I had woken up mere hours before. I was making a mental to-do list, setting goals, feeling energized and ready to tackle the day ahead. I’ll admit sitting down to eat my breakfast bowl and completing my morning journaling and newsletter reading did set me back a bit as it left me feeling sleepy once again but I muscled through and headed to my ‘office’ to get the work day started.
Things were moving right along. I wrapped up last week by writing out a to-do list of things to tackle in some ‘deep work’ this morning and afternoon. The time was carved out on my calendar and I was getting after it! Until I wasn’t. You see, there was a local internet outage in my area starting in the early afternoon and suddenly all to-do list progress came to a screeching halt. It’s funny how it takes an internet outage to realize how much you depend on it, you know? For work, for play, for everything really. It can leave you feeling quite helpless.
You don’t have your phone to turn to to distract you, can’t aimlessly watch YouTube, what do you do? Truly, what DO you do? Personally I’m grateful for the excuse to dive into whatever book I’m reading and likely need to catch up on but it also makes me reminisce on simpler times. Times when we didn’t have phones or TVs or computers to depend on to entertain ourselves. Times when we turned to outdoor activities, arts and crafts, friends to entertain our young, developing minds and bodies. I’m grateful to have grown up in a time when that was truly the best form of entertainment, long before social media took over and ensured we never spent another moment alone with our own thoughts if we truly didn’t want to. Honestly, if not for having grown up before the development and extreme takeover of Instagram, SnapChat, TikTok, YouTube, etc. would I even have the tools to entertain myself if and when those things were taken from me?
There’s something about summertime in general that makes me feel nostalgic. It always has. It takes me back to long, hot summer days spent at camps, swimming in friends pools, eating watermelon and popsicles and chips in between games of Sharks and Minnows. Days when my biggest concern was making sure I waited 30 minutes after eating before diving back into the pool or practicing my free throws in the gym for my summer basketball league. Simpler, beautiful times. It’s funny how quickly we yearn for adulthood during those times, not knowing all the responsibilities and subsequent lack of freedom that are coupled with that desired upgrade from ‘little kid’ to ‘independent adult.’
As I progress through a particularly unique chapter of my life, I find myself longing for those times. I find myself looking for ways to infuse more childlike wonder and awe back into my daily life, to practice daily moments of play and unadulterated joy. It made me kind of sad to recognize the anxiety I felt over our internet being down today and not being able to be readily available to respond to emails or slack messages. That was my thought process - think of all the important things I’m missing right now. But in reality, is anything on the computer really that important? Behind that layer of anxiety, I think a piece of me prayed it would never come back. That I could relish this moment, hide myself away in this little corner of the world where the internet doesn’t work and entertainment comes by way of the world outside my front door or in the depths of a good book or an even better conversation with the ones love…