Ron's Blog

Earlier this year, we had a busy few months of mostly normal life for people our age. We tended to some caregiving duties, visited with family, and then babysat our two-year-old granddaughter for four days. If you’re our age and have never babysat a two-year-old, I suggest you consider vitamin supplements chased with bourbon and a few amphetamines—just to keep up. I’m convinced that if it wasn’t for naps and bedtime, these little creatures would never stop moving. It’s exhausting. But it’s a wonderful form of exhaustion.

As our busy season started to wind down, we decided that we needed to wind down. So we booked a cruise. We looked forward to being unplugged from all of our everyday responsibilities and to escape the stress related to the national news and social media. Our plan was to eat and drink our way to the beautiful island of Bermuda where we spent our honeymoon a mere thirty-nine years earlier. Clearly, the trip had both mental and senti-mental benefits.

We boarded the ship in New York City and while we were waiting to leave, we grabbed a tropical drink from the bar and found a seat on the deck where we could admire the amazing skyline before we sailed into relaxation. But first, we felt that we should do a final check of our emails and take one last scroll down social media lane.

We had purchased an add-on package for the cruise that included drinks, wifi, and three specialty restaurants. This would save us money in the long run. Our only concern was that the package only gave us each 150 minutes of wifi for the entire cruise. That works out to about twenty minutes per day. And even though the entire goal of the cruise was to unplug, twenty minutes of daily wifi made both of us uneasy. So, we sat there sipping our drinks while burying our faces in social media posts about irritating politics, celebrity sightings, and ordinary people doing stupid things. We didn’t move until the view of Manhattan was out of sight and our phones showed us that we no longer had a cell signal. Now, we were forced to use our wifi minutes very carefully. That called for another drink. Luckily, that benefit of our add-on package didn’t have a limit.

Our first encounter with this newfound unplugged-ness was when we discussed which specialty restaurants we wanted to visit. We had failed to pre-register for them so we needed to do that early in the cruise before they sold out. Wendy asked me what our choices were. Without even thinking, I pulled out my phone to open the cruise app. That’s when I discovered that the cruise app required wifi to work. That’s pretty sneaky. They give you an app to make it easy to find things on the cruise while even easier to burn up the wifi minutes. I wasn’t falling for it. Instead, we walked about seven miles back to our cabin (did I mention that the ship was huge?) and looked up the restaurants on the free television in our room. I then began to wonder if being unplugged meant that we would also get more steps each day. Perhaps while avoiding social media drama we would be building tighter calves. That’s a bonus.

Later that afternoon, there was a trivia game in one of the larger gathering spaces on the ship. My wife loves games so we thought this would be fun. We settled into two seats, ordered another tropical beverage, and prepared to crush the competition with our aged, yet brilliant, trivia minds. The emcee of the game then instructed us to log onto the free trivia game app in order to play. We tried, and of course, the app required wi-fi. Sneakier still. But this was different. We were using the wifi for fun rather than online addictions so it seemed justified. We used my phone and the game took about twenty minutes. So we figured I had met my limit for the day. Unfortunately, after the game I put my phone back in my pocket but forgot to log off of the wifi. Thirty minutes later, I learned a valuable lesson: Turn off the wifi when not in use. The only upside was my email had download and I could read it offline. But, I was already at a deficit and the cruise had just started. I felt a bead of sweat roll down from my armpit. 

This unplugged thing was hard and as I kept scolding myself for wasting minutes, a voice in my head reminded me that this trip was about relaxation and not about how many wi-fi minutes I had left. I was focusing on the wrong thing. It was a good reminder and I was able to settle down for the rest of the afternoon. Then, when we returned to our cabin after dinner, there was a flyer under our door. It said, “DON’T SWEAT ABOUT USING UP ALL OF YOUR WIFI. BUY THE UNLIMITED PACKAGE BEFORE TUESDAY AND SAVE BIG!”

Ugh.

Our routine onboard followed a familiar pattern. Every time Wendy and I were in the middle of a discussion and we couldn’t remember an actor’s name or wanted to know the final score of a sporting event, I pulled out my phone only to realize that I wasn’t connected to wi-fi. We would then debate whether the information we wanted was important enough to burn minutes. Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn’t. But just having to make the decision was ruining our relaxation.

On our second day at sea, it occurred to me that when we turned our phones off at night, no one could reach us. What if there was an emergency back home or one of our kids needed to call us? We wouldn’t find out until we turned our phones back on the next morning. Wendy kindly reminded me that we were in the middle of the ocean and even if there was an emergency, we couldn’t do anything about it. She made a valid point but it still gnawed at me.

Mornings created a different dilemma. Our normal routine at home was to enjoy our coffee while glancing through the news and doing a crossword puzzle. On the ship, we didn’t have access to the news or crossword puzzles—unless we were willing to burn minutes. So, we read books (bound written materials often found in libraries), studied the day’s activity onboard, or sat on the balcony admiring the blue ocean. I have to be honest with you, I was very uneasy with this routine. I didn’t feel that I was accomplishing anything. For the most part, I was doing nothing and that just felt wrong. I was beginning to wonder if we should have unplugged at all.

The week sailed on and when we arrived in Bermuda, our cell phones worked again. This saved us precious minutes of wi-fi and allowed us to once again read endless unnecessary news reports and inane social media posts. When we finally got back to New York at the end of our trip, we had kept in touch with society, tried to relax when we could, and even had a few minutes of wi-fi left. I kept my phone connected that last night of the cruise, just to burn off the anxious memory of those minutes.

As someone who has studied mindfulness for the past twenty years, I’m amazed at how hard it was for me to unplug. Not only did we have this huge fear of missing out on something, we had unknowingly created a hard-to-break habit where our arms reached for our phones before we even conscious of what we were doing.  And yet, the entire time we were gone, there was this amazingly beautiful unplugged world right in front of us.

I guess the lesson here is to realize the value of what’s available in the moment instead of trying to seek something elsewhere. There is nothing better on our phones than the reality of the moment in front of us. In fact, I think a wise person once said that. I can’t remember who it was but if you give me a minute, I can look it up on online.

Dang.