Over the recent years, I think us a large number of us human people have developed an extra limb of sorts... a little extra bit that has attached itself to the ends of our hands... otherwise known as a mobile phone.
I wish I was kidding.
But I'm SO not.
I for one get myself in a panic if I make it halfway to the shops in my car and I realise that I don't have my phone with me.
Worse yet if my kids or my hubby leave the house and after they have gone I see that they have left their phone behind on the kitchen bench.
I mean what if I need to call them... or worse yet - what if they need me and they have no way to contact me?
What if there is an emergency, or an accident, or an earthquake or a tidal wave?
I know, I know, I have a tendency to be a little overly dramatic at times but... what if?
Ahhhhh Sonia, wake up chickadee because people and families and completely neurotic worrying mothers totally survived the no phone dilemma for a looooong long time before phones where even invented, so why the hell do you think you wouldn't?
Because I'm just used to it, that's why.
That was wake up call number one.
On the way to work this morning, I pulled up at a set of traffic lights on the main road at Collaroy beach. Right next to these traffic lights is a major bus stop on route to the city and given that it was peak hour, there were loads of people there.
Sixteen of them in fact.
Yep I actually counted them, and they were all dressed in varying degrees of work attire, waiting for what I presumed was the bus that would take them on their daily commute to the city.
What stood out to me more than anything wasn't the fact that there were a lot of people waiting for the bus, it was that every single one of them, bar one, were either talking on their phones or looking at them.
The one guy who wasn't looking at his phone, was just standing there watching the world go by and was probably more in the moment than the rest of them put together.
I want to be that guy.
Wake up call number two.
I saw this quote over the weekend... ahem... whilst I was looking at Pinterest on my phone.
It was like someone literally grabbed that phone out of my hands and smacked me in the head with it several times, and said "SONIA, LOOK UP" because when I did raise my head up from my phone, there was my hubby sitting next to me reading a magazine and two out of three of my kids playing with the dogs. It was like a happy freaking scene out of a banking commercial and I was missing it.
What the hell was I doing?
I WAS with the people that SHOULD make me forget to check my phone and they absolutely WOULD make me forget about it if I wasn't so busy with my head up my own ... well you know what!
It was an eye opener you guys.
A big fat in your face kind of eye opener that I am going to refer to as - wake up call number three.
As someone who can't avoid spending time on my phone during working hours, I really need to learn to switch it off for a while when I'm not working.
I mean - what's the point of worrying about what could happen to my hubby or my kids if they were to leave the house without their phone, if I am too busy spending the time I am with them ON my own damn phone.
That extra limb has to go... at least for a little while every now and then.
How attached to your phone are you?
Do you purposely leave your phone behind on the kitchen bench every now and then?