Exigence

This morning I herded my cats (children) out the door, grabbed all the stuff they’d need for the day, and walked out myself. We piled into the car and headed toward my mom’s house. And it wasn’t until we got to 56th & R that I realized something.

I forgot my phone.

If this were 2003, it would not have been a big deal. I wouldn’t have had a mini-panic attack in the driver’s seat waiting for the light to change. But it was like someone had sliced off one of my limbs without my noticing.

It took me a few minutes to talk myself down. I didn’t need it to call anyone (but of course I had terrible daydreams about crashing the car and not being able to summon aid while bleeding to death). And it’s not like it’s a fancy smartphone, so I’m better off than one of those people who is constantly connected to the internet and social media. I wonder if there’s an app for reminding you not to leave your phone at home.

I calmed down a little bit and continued on the drive, but it wasn’t long before I was plotting when I could go home and retrieve my phone. When that realization hit my conscious mind, I told my subconscious to chill. “I don’t need it,” I informed myself. “Just because it’s usually always there when I happen to want it to send a text or check the time or call my husband doesn’t mean it needs to be within my reach every single second of my life.” My subconscious came back with, “well I wouldn’t have been thinking about it if my boss wasn’t going to try to get ahold of me later today.” I acknowledged that as a good point and allowed myself to continue to contrive a time to reacquire it.

This is one of  Dave Richardson's one liners.

The final decision was that I would just have to live without it until I could get it again. Even though I knew that I didn’t need it, I still felt like I was going to die without it. This isn’t a great snapshot of our society. What are we going to do during the zombie apocalypse when all of the cell towers go down and we can’t coordinate our counterattacks that way? The way we’re going, the harshest sentencing for criminals in the future will be that we take away their iPhones.

I can live without my cell phone for a while. I know this in my head, but it’s hard to remember when it’s usually something I have every second of the day. Today, I think I’ll be okay without it.

But I did just reach for it to take a picture of my kid.