The slap of panic halted when I returned and found everything as I had left it. Coffee cups, pastry flakes, and my phone together on the table. Never, since losing one of my children in a shopping centre, does my heart beat as fast as when I think I’ve lost my mobile. Sad but true. My life is easier with my mobile to hand.
I try to keep my reliance on it in check. The path of least resistance to acknowledging my device is becoming dangerously a crutch is my readiness to excuses for my palm-sized plastic covered, piece of technology. My excuses only reinforce how shielded I’ve become by distracting features. Do I really need so many Apps demanding my attention? The quickest route, deceiving myself into thinking I’m in control, is not the path of least resistance.
It was time to take back control. The normally cluttered displays would be no more, my mobile needed a spring clean to allow the hidden items to surface. To block out the chaos took me a lot longer than I’d planned or expected, but with all the pollution gone, I discovered literally long-forgotten useful Apps amongst the waste-of-time ones. My mobile wasn’t the crutch - the waste-of-time Apps had been a distraction diverting me away from useful Apps, which diverted me away from doing something about it.
Crutches start out as something good but can have a negative impact when they stop our ability to exercise our full capacity. At SUF towers seeing ‘structures/arrangements’ that started life as a financial crutch and becoming part of someone’s problem is too often but, whilst it takes a bit longer than spring cleaning a smartphone, facing up to the problem and disentangling opens up new possibilities.
