This post is one of those who came up totally unplanned and which I decided to write today after my cell phone has been sent to a repair shop to be fixed.
You might be wondering why such an out-of-the-box issue and what made me write this post.
Well, because of the first ackward feeling that I had of walking around in the city and sit down on a Cafe Konditorei without the possibility of checking every now and then my cell phone. It was strange. I felt uncomfortable, as if it was missing some part of me. As if I was alone in the world. And well, it is not the same thing as if you were working all day without checking the cell phone, or if you were focused on some other task and could check your cell phone some hours later. Because somehow the decision was yours. You could reached it at any time if you wanted to. No. This time it was different. This time I had no other choice but to leave it there for repair. I would need to survive through the day without using my cell phone. It was as if I had to learn again how to speak or to walk or how to ride a bike.
How to know what my next U-bahn connection to get home would be? Would I need to rush up to not lose it? Has anyone sent me an urgent message? Or just a note to not forget to buy bread on my way home? and what to do while waiting for my order in the Konditorei? nothing to read or to get updated, no way of surfing on the net and read the news or check my emails. Just the Speisekarte in front of me. And some other guests sitting on the nearby tables. Chatting, enjoying their coffee and meals. One lady sitting alone cheking her cell phone while frowning.
Then I found myself looking at the place, its decoration, the colours, the waitress movements, the kind of guests coming and going. I realised that it was some kind of typical Grätzl Cafe, not those fashioned touristic ones in the city centre but one of the more familiar type. The waitress was alone trying to get all guests’ requests with a smile on her face. Some I could say were already Stammkunden (regular customers). The atmosphere was very cosy, but not that kind of classic imperial style or of dashing scandinavian style cosiness. It was a human warm cosiness that I would relate more to its people rather than to its decoration. The place was inviting without being particularly fashionable.
Then I picked up a pen that I still had by chance in my bag and started to make notes about my thoughts, what was crossing my mind. Scratches about things I wanted to be changed in my life or tasks to be finished. I gathered some ideas of what I wanted to do with my friends that are coming to visit me late this month. And suddenly I realised that being without the cell phone had actually given me the possibility to see life again around me and not only through this square screen. To be more in the moment and less in a virtual one.
I came up with the tought that we need to reeducate our brains again, a back to the roots. Our interaction with the world is not only measured by the number of clicks we press on the display or how many instastories and pics we share with a virtual audience. Our interaction with the world is measured by the number of smiles we share, the emotions we live together, the experiences we get of the outside world when we really observe it.
But then what if I had the cell phone with me during all this time?
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