Secular Sabbath - it's time to unplug

I am 'wired' - by this I mean that there is never a time of the day or night where I cannot access the internet (and particularly my email). My trusty Nokia E90 and iPhone keep me connected to the net when out and about.

Other than that I have wireless network at home to which I connect using the wifi adaptor on my Macbook Pro.

I will confess that I like to remain connected! I like to check my email, occasionally check the RSS feeds on the blogs and websites that I follow, and be able to connect and communicate with ease and reliability wherever I am.

Since my accident, however, I have been trying NOT to answer my phone! It is amazing - I have a message indicating that I am on sick leave, with contact numbers and details for persons to phone if they have work queries, and yet I still get around 10 calls a day saying things like "I know you're off, but could you please...", "Sorry to worry you, but would you mind..."

At first I felt guilty, but then I thought, I am not well, there are others who can deal with the queries and so I have plucked up the courage NOT to answer those calls. Let me tell you, it is NOT easy! I feel guilty, lazy, and worry that others may not answer the calls as quickly or directly as I would.

There are many of us who feel this way about dealing with things. As I think about it, there are a few reasons why we feel this:

1. We want people to think about us as efficient, effective, helpful, and validate our worth. So, we sacrifice our own wellbeing and needs to try and get others to create an impression of us that is unrealistic.

2. We are not secure enough to trust other persons who can do our work as well as we can (although differently) to just do it! This is NOT a good thing! We tend to secretly believe that we're indispensable, and others will manipulate this 'secret' feeling in order to get us to do what they want, when they want it and how they want it.

3. Perhaps we haven't set up good systems to work in spite of us. This is not a good thing in the Church in particular! A great deal of what every efficient, clever, hard working person should do is to work themselves out of a job by helping others to develop and be able to do what they're doing. A good leaders should empower others to do their work, and do it even better than they can. This not only gets the work done but develops participation and sustainability.

I'm sure that there are many other things that you could add to this list (please feel free to do so in the comments!).

What trigured this post? Well, the following article from www.lifehacker.org

Self-described "techno-addict" Mark Bittman (who sleeps with his laptop on his night table to check email first and last thing) decided to unplug every weekend for 24 hours, a day he calls "secular Sunday." At first the experiment made him twitchy and nervous, but over time, he came to enjoy his unplugged day. He writes:

I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life - or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn't such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

Like other geeks, on my recent vacation I also found that unplugging does bring about a calm you can't find in your RSS reader. Good night, secular Sunday. See you next week.
I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.

Technorati tags: secular sabbath, always connected, iPhone, Nokia e90, tunning out