There’s a new conversation gesture that is taking over us 20-30 somethings, and it’s probably even worse in younger people. It’s the ‘mid-conversation-half-glance-at-my-cellphone’ move. You’ve probably noticed it, and if you haven’t noticed it, that probably means this move has become entirely second nature to you.
It’s pretty harmless. You find yourself mid-conversation and it’s not that the conversation is boring or uninteresting. But maybe you want to check the time, or see if there are any messages for you to look forward to when the conversation is over. Or maybe you are really waiting on an urgent text that requires an immediate response. Or maybe you’re on the other extreme, and you find that interesting (but not urgent) text that you want to respond to right away. Next thing you know, you have disengaged almost entirely from the real conversation, and are more invested in the phone conversation.
Either way, it has become entirely normal for us in conversation. And I am guilty of pretty much every single one of these offenses.
I spent most of my break from school meditating on Sabbath and to be honest, Sabbath can be stressful. I mean a lot of the gospel stories tell of Jesus being tracked all over by Jewish religious leaders calling him out for breaking Sabbath: for healing people, for not giving offerings, for walking through a field of grain. It is stressful when you have to keep laws about how far you can walk and how much work you can do.
Over the break, a friend of mine shared with me the realities of the Jewish tradition of Sabbath. He was in the Holy Land and was trying to catch a bus out of the country as part of a trip with his brother. But they were racing against the Sabbath, hoping to catch the last bus before all businesses in the city shut down. He arrived at the bus station, only to realize he had lost his passport. They missed the bus, but to make matters worse, he had to wait until Sunday to go to the U.S. embassy to replace is passport. He arrived at the embassy to find that they not only kept the Jewish Sabbath, but also the Christian Sabbath, so they were closed on Sunday as well. I call that double-Sabbath.
The legalism of this tradition is prevalent in our thinking. But I’m wondering about the liberation that comes from the restrictions. If there’s one day a week where you can’t shop, you can’t even ride a bus if you wanted to – what do you do? Well, I imagine in a tradition that takes this idea so seriously, it’s not very hard…maybe even second nature to them. You re-establish sacred time. You’ve limited yourself so that the only real thing you CAN do is to share a nice meal and spend time with your family. Only to them it’s probably not really a bunch of restrictions. It’s probably a blessing in a lot of ways.
And so I came back from the break with one resolution weighing on my mind: Make life more reflective of Sabbath living. Create more sacred spaces. After reading how one of my favorite authors orients his writing life (here), I’ve found my first step: personal conversations.
I’m going to work on breaking the ‘phone-glance’ habit by taking phone free hours. Each day for one month, I will turn my phone completely off from the hours of 8 am to 11 am and also from 6 pm to 10 pm. I pick those times because those are some of the more hectic times in my day (trying to get to and from school, meetings, work, etc.) and also the times when I am trying to get school work done. I will also try to minimize compulsive Facebook and e-mail checking, though I’m unwilling at this point to place restrictions on those.
I’m not trying to condemn the use of these technologies – they are very good at connecting us to friends all across the country, and giving access to instant information. But I am interested in seeing what happens when I have to re-orient my life around those phone-free times. Maybe the sacredness of personal conversations will be restored. Maybe I can devote more attention to studying and reading. And maybe the conversations through phone or social technologies will become more substantive as well. So here’s to the month-long experiment in Sabbath living!
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