Desires can be a big smoke screen. You think that you need someone or something, but it isn’t true. Only when you resist what is here do you desire what is not.

– Paul Ferrini,

“Everyday Wisdom”

(Heartways Press, 2002)

“Geez, I am talking on the phone a lot,” I told my husband, Jay, about a year ago.

After I’d been retired from teaching for some months, I found that my number and length of phone conversations had increased exponentially, and that I was spending a good part of the day with a phone glued to my ear.

Part of that was a function of being home more often when the phone rang. Part of it was because I’d no longer run out of words from dispersing them in the classroom. Part of it was I was talking to people for whom I have genuine love about subjects for which we share a great interest (namely, ourselves).

Phoner’s ache, the condition associated with holding a cordless phone with nothing but one’s neck and shoulder, began to flare up and landed me in the chiropractor’s office regularly. So, my husband bought me a headset with a boom microphone and began referring to me as his spiritual air traffic controller.

“You just stand around the house with the headset on waiting for the jets to fly in,” he said, grinning.

About the same time, I began relying on the iPhone calendar, and carried it with me, something I had not done prior. A good pair of ear buds allowed me to talk without discomfort or distraction. So I answered that phone too.

It was not uncommon for both phones to ring at the same time.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s Skype (an application for talking computer to computer for free), which I began to use more frequently to keep in touch with friends overseas.

The result was that I spent more time on the phone than after my initial lament. Lots more.

“Once I get on the phone, time melts away and the whole day is over before I realize it, and then the week,” I told Jay six months later. “I’m getting nothing done.”

So, Jay and I began our off-grid days in August, Sunday night through Monday night. It’s been five months of imperfectly adhering to that, sometimes having a phone call slip, but mostly, enjoying the lack of distractions.

That off-grid time caused me to notice many things:

1. As I’m called to more silence, I’m more aware of how much I talk.

2. If I were to listen more on the telephone, the calls would last minutes, not hours.

3. Trying to stop talking has no effect other than a heightened awareness of watching myself be unable to shut up.

From the time I was a child, I’d felt more comfortable writing than talking, more able to express a depth of feeling quickly than if trying to say it out loud. Hence, I told myself I still prefer communicating that way.

Given my behavior, that does not seem to be the case. At long last, however, it’s just fine with me, and there is no desire to be anything different.

The motto these days is this: relax, notice, breathe and let whatever comes up naturally rip.

Until the ripping quiets down, however, Jay’s keeping a box of earplugs next to our bed.