What We Get Used To

This is the third time I’ve come into my favorite restaurant to write, only to find their wi-fi down. What that means is that I can’t get on the internet. I can’t post to my blog. Everything I do, must be done ‘offline’ and then ‘posted’ later. It’s an annoyance that creates extra work for me.

I find it interesting, because I have come to ‘expect’ to be able to get on the internet here. When it isn’t working, it is frustrating to me.

In the old days, I would have never expected to find internet access in a restaurant. Now, it’s annoying to me when it’s not available.

If you stop to think about it, we have become quite dependent on things that can’t always be depended upon.

Think about your last power outage. Where I live we sometimes lose power for days at a time. When the electricity stops flowing we have to worry about our food spoiling in the refrigerator, we can’ use our washing machine, some of us can’t cook our food and of course none of our technological gadgets keep working after their batteries run down. Sometimes it’s hard to continue with life as we know it when this happens.

I am trying to think of ‘interruptions’ as a reminder that I didn’t always have these ‘luxuries’ and that life did, in fact, happen without them! We don’t absolutely NEED much of what we think we do in order to live happy, productive lives.

As I sit here with no internet… unable to surf, post, email or IM (Instant messenger), I’ll remember that there was a time when I had to type everything I wrote on a typewriter and use white out to correct small mistakes and retype the entire page if the mistake was too great. I’ll also remember that at one time people didn’t have typewriters and penned everything by hand. Even before that, there were no pens… no paper… and still life continued.

Once in a while, give yourself a break from some of the things you’ve grown dependent upon. It’s a powerful way to stay connected to reality and remain grounded in a world where it’s all too easy to get a seriously unbalanced sense of the concept of what it means to ‘need’ something.