Your Phone. Time Well Spent?

Hey! Morning to Soul Sips on Sunday. Yummy coffee. God, what is life without coffee? I suppose someday I might find out. I used to drink coffee all of the day. I used to fall asleep with a cup of coffee beside my bed. And gradually, as time, as my body got a little bit healthier, I could only consume so much. So, I consume two cups a day and I’m really comfy with that but it’s one of those small pleasures that I would have such a hard time with losing.

But that sort of leads me into this thought for this conversation for today that I’d like to have with you. You know, if you guys are, you’re probably my ageish, and we got on Facebook in the past ten years, we got cellphones, I have to think when I got my first cell phone, it was definitely a flip up. But I think when things really started changing was the iPhone and I think that was around 2010? I don’t even know, but anyways.

When all of that changed and social media came in I was like clearly an adult. I remember different things, watching people on it or always posting – I remember back then like absolutely everything was perfect. Pictures were perfect and you’re like, “Oh my God! Those people are so happy and what a beautiful family blah blah blah” and Gawd, I was probably doing it too. And they’re having so much fun. And now as we’re seeing more come forward, and we’re actually getting real with all the shit that’s going down and how we’re really living. I like COVID brought a lot of that into the surface too.

The other day I was talking to my sister who’s in Toronto and we were just talking casually and she said, “Oh, another COVID divorce” and I’m like yeah, it brought a lot of things to the surface. You had to look at yourself real hard, you had to look at your partner real hard. You had to look at your environment. I don’t know how many times I just wanted to clobber my children. And yeah, I often thought about that, if I was going into COVID with a shitty relationship with a lot of stuff going on, you’d either go hard right or hard left.

Kind of going back to the coffee, your habits and routines and what COVID kind of brought to light was exactly that. I thought a lot of my habits and routines became this like, “What am I doing all the time?” “How am I spending my time?” Well what really, through time, I just try to keep making changes because again, I know, sometimes I just jump all over the place, I think my mind is going one way or the other, but I like to just keep talking to you. To keep it real!

But one of the things that I feel that I think I’ve learnt going through my divorce is that through the busyness and the ‘comfortability’ of my relationship. I had been dating him for nine years and then had been married for sixteen years, and so you become really comfortable with people, really, really comfortable with people. And you get into grooves and they’re so hard – they’re almost ruts, and they’re hard to get out of, and it takes a lot of work, and sometimes getting uncomfortable to get yourself out of that. And then it’s even, how do I do it without him? Maybe I want to make the change but what if he doesn’t want to make the change? What’s that going to look like?

So, going through those experiences, being in a relationship now, I often will see myself going into that rut or speaking that way or behaving that way and I now kind of go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! We need to do something because I don’t want that to happen.” You know I just don’t want to experience that again, you know it wasn’t healthy.

So, I felt COVID did that. And very interestingly, we made a little bit of a pact with ourselves, if we’re going to be home, we’re going to be careful that we don’t get into these ruts and routines. So we consciously made some decisions as to what we wanted to, made sure we spent time doing during COVID. And it was good, and I think a lot of us did a lot of gardening and took care of our homes and we spent time with our kids in different ways then maybe we wouldn’t have. And the big thing that I did was I spent time with myself in a different way, and I really challenged myself to get out of some of my patterns and routines.

Well, ironically, last night, my partner and I, we were comparing how many, how much usage time was on our phone and it was crazy, and I beat him by minutes, however we were both in the four hour mark, and I know there are days when I’m over that. And I kind of went, “Holy Shit! Am I on my phone that much? I can’t believe I’m on my phone that much? And you’re on your phone that much! What would we be doing if we weren’t on our phone that much?” And then I went, ding, ding, ding, ding, is this what happens in relationships and marriages and we start numbing ourselves and we just get caught up and then you guys know this, not necessarily from being inspired by what’s on our social media or what we’re watching or what our habits are and our routines.

So, it kind of sets me into this additional place. I started picking away at this a little bit ago when I would open up Facebook, I would see people that would trigger me. And then, so I started blocking people. And I remember the day I told one of my boys, we were talking about something, and there was an individual who wanted to follow me, and, or it’s just open to follow me on Instagram, and I said, “No, no, no”. I said no, and so I blocked that person, and my son got mad and me and he said, “Why would you be doing that? That is not nice to do. You should just let her follow you.” And then I would also get, I don’t know how it all works but then I knew I was going to get her information, and I said, “no”.

I get to choose what that world looks like for me. That was the beginning of me really understanding my extended boundaries. And I had a hard time explaining it to him then, and I’m not even sure I could do it really well right now, other than, I really, really believe there is an importance to boundaries. And you get to set them, and I talked about this last week, about betraying ourselves. It’s kind of like our rules, like what makes us up, and what I’d like to think is even deeper routed is our integrity. And it’s whatever I feel works for me and whatever works for you. It’s kind of, again, goes back to, you be you and I’ll be me. No shame, no judgement. Let’s just let each other be and do whatever. Come into my world, go out of my world. We all get to make these decisions.

But it’s what’s integral to who you are versus pleasing other people. And my God, we are masters at pleasing other people and this whole uncomfortableness to say, no, this doesn’t work for me anymore. Where it’s in relationships, it can get super uncomfortable, when you’ve always done something a certain way and you start saying, “that’s a rut” or “I don’t like how I feel when this happens when we do this or when you do that”. You can change your story. I think it’s good to change your story. Be careful that we don’t get caught up in the story that we’ve always told ourselves, or we’ve been told.

So, jumping back, we’re both looking at our screen time and realizing that we have over four hours screen time, and then we get into a conversation that was really actually cool and uncomfortable. And it was really cool and uncomfortable because we had to both look at each other. We weren’t, what we first said to do was, I’m not blaming you, and I’m not saying you’re worse because you’ve got seventeen minutes more on. It was more, I was saying to myself, what am I going to do? Are you onboard? That was the question. From my experience from my divorce, it was important that that conversation happen and that there is a degree that we’re on board together. So if he’s not onboard, that’s a whole other conversation. I’m not manipulating it but having that conversation and having to understand why you’re not on board and what are we going to do because I don’t think it’s healthy.

So, the cool thing was, was that we both agreed, holy crap, you know? And the second thing was okay well what are we going to do because we have a lot of things that we’re not similar. And it’s not like we’re forcing things that are similar but what would like to do that would add to our quality time. So, this is, kind of again, something interesting that I really encourage you, whether you have a partner or not, you as a person, how are you living? And are you numbing yourself. Are you setting boundaries, which again, looking at all that stuff, is uncomfortable. But you know, and I know that when we step into that uncomfortable, that’s where we actually grow. We see how we can role in uncomfortable.

You know, there was a time ago when I had first separated from my husband and I would walk a lot with my girlfriend and we used to say, “When is life going to get easy again?” She had just recently separated as well and we’re like “why is it so difficult and why is it so stressful and why and I so upset and why is he so upset? Why are the kids so upset and how are we supposed to manage this and everything else?” And we would just keep going on about, when is life going to get easy again! When is it going to get simple? And the reality is, is as life goes on and as the world that we’re in, it doesn’t, but as you chose to step into that uncomfortable, you realize that you’ve got muscles in you that work, that get stronger – your resilience, that’s what it is. Your compassion grows, you’re letting go of control and you’re also choosing to grab a hold of what you can, and I don’t want to say lose control but what you can add to your life and what you can build on your roots of who you are, and where you want to go. It doesn’t have to be that story you’ve been told; that story you thought you were going to be living. It’s okay. Be flexible. Your rigidness is not 2020.

But anyways, jumping back again, we’re looking at our phones, we’re saying we have to make some changes, and what do we do? Well. Here are a few things that I’d like to just share we you because again as we’re having this conversation, we’re realizing there’s no way that we’re the only couple out there who is on our phones so much. And this doesn’t even touch upon what our kids are doing or how they’re managing it. But for today it’s just about us because again, they do see us. Okay so we said, all right, let’s kind of be conscious of this. I used to park my phone a lot. I’d come home from work and I’d park it and it wouldn’t move until everyone went to bed and then I’d pick it up and do work. Now I just find its’s, my big thing is I go for a walk with the dog, I leave my phone here, but I’m not back in the house five minutes and I’m back on that phone checking for messages or whatever it might be.

So, how long can you park your phone? How long can you go with it turned off? Can you do what I call a Facebook cleanse, and I delete my apps, and I go for a time period where I just say I’m done. It’s okay to go back on them but just see if you can. Can you challenge yourself to do that? We actually talk about reading and not reading on your phone, reading from a book. And then we actually talked about reading together. You know, there’s a more in-depth book that I’m reading and wanting to have a conversation about. It’s very intellectual on the basis of racism and and how it’s grown and it goes into a lot od depth and a lot of stories and it’s something I’d like to discuss because it’s difficult and it’s mind boggling to me, and so we said, let’s read that book together.

We run together. We now have started walking at night together. It’s not something that my partner enjoys doing but we’ve eased into it and he enjoys it more now, we have great conversations outside and it’s beautiful out. Actually last night was the first time we said everyone talks about fall and what a beautiful time of year it is but both of us agreed that fall means winter is coming and over the years, that’s always meant, “Agghh!” Fall! That means summer’s going and winter is coming. But last night we were really like, “My God, it really is gorgeous out. It really is a beautiful time of year. Can’t we just enjoy the now?”

So, it’s about changing those stories. It’s about stepping into some uncomfortable, I don’t know, I certainly don’t have any answers but I just felt like I wanted to talk about it because I feel like there is no way that I am the only person that has four hours on my phone. And also, kind of questioning where I’m at, like those four hours I was on my phone, was that four hours I could have been hanging out with my kids (I don’t think they would have wanted to but regardless), could I have been doing something with my partner. Could I have simple just been doing something aww like gardening or yoga. Studying. Whatever it might be.

So anyways, I encourage you to take a look at that. I encourage you to be looking at your story. I encourage you to be stepping into some uncomfortable and growing because you’re so capable of it and you have so much more living to do. And to be fierce. Be fierce.

Cheers.