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| Dick Rolfe | Phil Boatwright | Sean Herriott |
Resolve To Unplug
by Sean Herriott
New Year's resolutions are easy . . . I just roll ’em over from last
year. I do have one resolution
left over from last year — the diet and exercise thing — but I've also
made a pact with my wife, Stacey, and it’s a high-tech resolution of sorts:
we resolved to spend less quality time with our electronic devices, and more
with each other.
We took a vacation around Christmastime. During those 10 days away, I mostly resisted the urge to peek at my
e-mail (I checked it once--and had 198 new messages). We intended to take a cellular phone with us, but I used it in on the
way to the airport and left it in the car. That turned out to be a blessing.
On the few occasions we needed to make a call on the road, we
discovered something called a "payphone." They're everywhere, apparently.
For
several days we stayed at an inn that had neither phones nor televisions in
their rooms, and we hardly missed them.
It's easy to become lost in the busy pace of our lives, and in the many
devices we use to cope with ever-increasing amounts of information. Of course, those devices also
generate information. My wife and I established a simple rule, which we've both been able to
abide by with few lapses, no Internet, no callbacks, no cell phones after
dinner. Stacey runs a ministry
for our church out of our home, thanks to limited office space; most of her
volunteers work during the day, so it's easy for her to end up on the phone
for hours at a time in the evening. Thanks
to cell phones and e-mail, I never have a shortage of work, even if I don't
bring home a briefcase full of papers.
Unplugging at night is a sacrifice--it means that Stacey has to manage her
workload differently, and that I have to make time in my already busy day for
work I've typically been doing at night. The benefits have far outweighed the inconvenience, however.
We not only have more time together, but we've re-ordered our
priorities to put our marriage front-and-center where it belongs. It has meant better communication, less friction during hectic weeks,
and a renewed sense of teamwork. We've
taken time in the past few weeks to relax together--to watch a movie, play a
board game, or eat out for the purpose of spending time together, and not
simply because we're both too tired and frazzled to cook. In the process we're rediscovering a simple fact; we really like
hanging out together.
It's amazing how all encompassing the idea of "forsaking all others" is when you begin to really take it seriously. All kinds of people, and all sorts of THINGS, compete for the time we should be spending nurturing our most important relationships. You don't have to eliminate those things from your life, but you might want to take a moment to ask yourself, who did I spend more quality time with today--my wife, or my WAP phone?