A mom was driving her kids to school when she realized she left her mobile (Blackberry or iPhone) at home. It was to late to go back and get it… She felt very nervous. She wouldn’t be home before the afternoon to have her phone back! Nobody would be able to reach her, she wouldn’t be able to contact anyone, no bbmms, no twitts… Total isolation!
She spent all morning not knowing what to do with her hands, she felt an almost unbearable void around her and inside her, she was distracted, unfocused… just like someone struggling to quit smoking, or quit drinking…she thought.
This woman had 2 choices:
1-Promiss herself not to forget her mobile anymore…. Ever.
2-Observe her addiction and reflect upon it.
In this second case, she had 2 choices again:
1-Justify: Mobile are necessary, something important could happen and I need to be reachable, plus, it’s nice and fun to receive bips and news and comments from everyone, it makes me feel integrated, alive, important, connected…
2-Look at the women she was converting herself into, ponder if that was who she wanted to be and decide if she would want to change her behavior.
There are events in our lives that come to us as mirrors, to help us look at ourselves, to stop and really observe what we are doing and how we are living. They are golden gifts but many times we don’t see them… or we don’t want to look at those mirrors.
What about this other story?
Many years ago, my friend K read an article about the humiliation people living in dictatorship have to endure. She was living at that time in a happy, free, nice country but she realized her marriage was a dictatorship and that she was living humiliated most of the time. This article came into her hands and she had the courage to look at the mirror. She decided she would not stand that anymore, she eventually divorced and wrote a thankful letter to the author, Vaclav Havel.
