No Signal, No Worries – Control Freak to Clarity

No signal, no worries – and a few lessons learned on vacation without cell signal.

JESHOOTS / Pixabay

I learned that I was an obsessive weather app checker. For some, it’s Facebook, Twitter, or even Pinterest. For me: it’s the weather. Upon reflection, this makes sense for an outdoorsy type with hobbies that include hiking and cycling. After three days without any cell phone signal during a recent vacation, I finally relinquished my obsessive need to control certain aspects of my life and consigned my fears to the winds – literally. I would be OK with being precipitated on. After all, I wouldn’t melt and I had more gear than a top notch boy scout: it would all be just fine.

One small step for me, one giant step towards gaining more space in my life.

It’s a little known fact that the average over-worked and typically stressed American takes at least a week and a half (if not two) to actually decompress during vacation. With the frantic chaos we call life, in between our laughable attempts to squeeze everything we want to do in a shoebox’s worth of time: who gets to take two entire weeks off for a vacation these days?

You will, if you are smart. Because that’s about how long it will take for the average American to genuinely relax.

Shivmirthyu / Pixabay

Typically, vacations tend to be an exercise in seeing how you can cram your daily work plus the work you will be missing over your vacation into the week before you leave. Once you get back (after you dig yourself out of the mountain of relentless and often redundant emails) it’s another several weeks before you can catch your breath again. This has certainly been the cycle of my life during my working career, but I have finally found a little freedom and perhaps a bit of clarity after the last multi-week road trip.

It was elevated a bit due to the extreme lack of cell phone signal. No signal, no worries!

Do you know how attached we are to our cell phones? If you don’t, consider going without your phone for a week. Just notice how that makes you feel and what concerns pop into your mind. (You know that people have survived for thousands of years without cell phones, right?) I already knew that I would need more than just one week to come out of the trees (so my grandma used to say) and achieve something called ‘normal’ again. So a two week hiatus from work was in the plan for the trip. Unplanned and originally unsettling was the “No Signal” notification on my phone for days on end. I was completely disconnected! What do I do??

For some reason, it’s only when we ‘disconnect’ we truly become ‘connected’.

kpgolfpro / Pixabay

We are so distracted every day by everything that is going on and this is magnified by the fact that we have a mobile device that gives us all the information we could ever want at our fingertips. World news (to tell you all the bad stuff), what our friends and family are doing plus what they think about all the bad stuff, internet so we research stuff, email and text to send and receive stuff, our calendars to remind us that we need to do more stuff, our endless to do lists that remind us how unproductive we are with our stuff, our tracking apps to log our stuff, and of course: the weather – so it doesn’t rain on our stuff.

If you shut all that noise up all you might have to talk to someone! Or, listen to all that brain noise… which is called “thinking” and is something apparently people avoid doing frequently based on the need to constantly jam music in their ears if they aren’t on their phone.

I thought, I read, and I talked to people. I was present, I truly enjoyed each moment, and I took pictures – but didn’t upload them to Facebook so I suppose they didn’t count. I relinquished the need to be in the ‘know’ so I could plan every moment. It was freedom and I didn’t have to pay anything for it.  I cannot quite describe the feeling of blissful space that opened up in my life and my mind simply because I didn’t have the distraction of a mobile device and I knew that I couldn’t ‘connect’ … so I connected to myself instead.

Unsplash / Pixabay

I wasn’t in control of my ‘stuff’ and it was wonderful.

“Life is continuously changing, and if you’re trying to control it, you’ll never be able to fully live it. Instead of living life, you’ll be afraid of life.”   – Michael Singer

I realized just HOW MUCH TIME I spent worrying, checking, planning, and updating. I wasn’t distracted and I could truly let go and enjoy the moment for what it was. Once I was able to make space for thinking objectively and gained more clarity, I was able to make some good decisions about my business. I didn’t have to make a rush judgement before another interruption in the endless lists of daily distractions afforded by our wonderful modern technology.

The control freak got clarity.

Don’t get me wrong; email on your phone is convenient, but we tend to view it as a necessity. Checking on family and friends is nice, but not something that has to happen multiple times a day. Even knowing what the weather is doing is helpful, but often inaccurate – so why do we even bother? Partly cloudy with a chance of showers pretty much sums up EVERY day.

Unsplash / Pixabay

The tricky part about this revelation is … how do I sustain it? Now that I’m back in the phone zone – how can I keep that space and clarity in my life?

Fortunately, knowledge and genuine acceptance is over half of the solution. The rest of it can be sustained by self-control. If you don’t have self-control, there are apps that can limit your social media or app usage for you. I set a schedule for my phone, just like anything else in life. You don’t do everything all the time, most people need to book things into their day: same thing applies to cell phone usage. I only check social media and news three times a day for 15 minutes. I check personal email on my phone once at lunch. Work emails don’t happen after 5pm, sorry. I have also realized that much of my day was full of activity but not action.

With this new-found mental space I can focus on things that matter, actionable items – not just a bunch of stuff all the time. I can respond rather than react and I suddenly have time to do the things languishing on my To Do list! But, it took the shock of being out of my comfort zone and the ability to reflect upon what it really meant to make the shift from control freak to clarity.

I hope this helps you find a little clarity through the act of letting go.