Wednesday's Warrior~"Why I Try And Forget My Cell"

    You are out to lunch with a friend, and in mid sentence, Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" invades your zone. Frantically, the person that you were in an intense conversation with, starts digging towards the noise, staring for a moment at the small screen before starting an entirely new conversation with someone else while you stare in bewilderment. Did this really just happen? It takes a moment before you realize that you have been majorly dissed. After a few moments, you hear "Oh, where were we? John didn't know what to make for dinner and Sara couldn't find her ipod charger. Did you say your grandmother was dying? I'm so sorry."
                 
           How the hellzo (I made that word up) did we EVER get so detached?

     Speaking of detached. Walking in the woods with the kids, pretending to look at the leaves, wishing she could check facebook. Cell phone rings. (thank God...escape. She doesn't want to be in the darn woods anyway...too many bugs) Kids let out a sigh of cantankerous rebellion. "Mommy will be just a minute." (Ignoring everything around her but the phone call) Walks away into the trees, finger in one ear, cell on the other, oblivious to everything around her. 5 minutes later, turns around only to yell at bickering kids. Back to cell. 15 minutes later, kids are sullen and annoyed. "What is the problem here? Can't mommy take a simple phone call?"
                                         
                                                 Fun = over.
                                                                         
                                                 I've done it.

                                     I don't want to be that mom.

   They ring in the middle of sermons, recitals and reunions. They pierce the air in the glorious silence of the morning, permeate the evening sunset and seep into the hours in between. All around us, the emergency calls come in...in cars, parking lots and grocery stores with children, who are in desperate competition with the latest apparatus, dragging on the sleeves of parents who have no time to spare, teens in tow, texting and tweeting obsessively not once questioning their utter unhappiness.

                       Why are we so desperately trying to escape reality?

                                      What are we running from?

     What to pull out for dinner, missing soccer shoes, car pool locations and when will you be home's? The one sided conversations are loud and crystal clear as if the two folks on the phone were the only two in existence. In a way, I wish they were...on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific.

     But what would happen if we tuned out distractions and tuned in to the present moment? Really listened to our children. Looked at someone in the eye and really connected. Said our prayers and really focused on what we were saying. Were sincere in our sympathetic responses to the latest tragedy. Shut the world out for a day. Would things be OK? Would the people trying in desperation to connect survive the rejection?

                                 Things will be OK. They will survive.

     Dad will make dinner, daughter will find the missing shoe, the boss will call someone else in and the dog will get a bone. We live in a world where time and space as we know it will soon fade away and the moments that could have been will gently float away with them. I wonder if we will still be so disconnected at our last breath that we won't even recognize the bitterness of it all. Kids will be grown, others will be deceased, dreams gone, our lives hollow and flat with hardened hearts like stones. Every so often I start to see the bad fruits of disconnect in my own life and I have to run away from it for all I'm worth. Run back to my family and my dreams, not to be swept away by fickle, obscure fads and trends that will all rot in the ground anyway.

 Do you want to be free? I sometimes do and it is why I try and forget my cell.

                                       Permanent ways to get radical:

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