Cell-Phone Counseling?

How is the relationship with your phone (or telecommunications device)? I’m discovering this is today’s personal question of impolite society. It is a living thing, almost unto itself, the cell-phone. It connects us in appropriate and inappropriate ways to avowed intimates and new friends, insatiable work environments and long-distance family connected so easily in no other way. It offers connectivity 24/7, which is potential boon for lived interdependence and bane for information-connection gorging. As I’ve gotten interested in what I call “habits of mind”—contemplative, embodied, overwhelmed, consumerist, corporate, whatever—I’ve become aware the cell-phone may be one of the most significant factors shaping our habits of mind today. What is the nature of your relationship with your cell phone? How does this relationship contribute to or detract from your ways of thinking?

My husband’s relationship with his cell phone is probably the healthiest I know. It’s purely a functional device for him. It connects him to his work in bounded ways. It allows him to talk with his family in Minnesota when both they and he are free. But sometimes he forgets where it is, even leaving it at the office by accident. He appreciates its contribution to his work and personal life, and he can leave it wherever he may.

My friends’ relationships with their devices vary as much as they do. Some leave it on the table when we’re having a beer together. Each time it buzzes or lights up, their eyes leave those of whomever they’re talking to just to see if it’s something important. Others keep it in their hands, “just in case.” Each time, an incoming message becomes part of the conversational space somewhere else on the planet.  Others have it within reach while attending to family living, randomly distracted and resourced by it. It’s never been easier to coordinate logistics of multiple family members as it is today, after all. Some friends were constantly connected--to me and to their families--because of a willingness to be tethered to their phones.

Of course, I write about this because my own relationship with a cell phone is so bizarre, completely mental. It buzzes in my pocket and my mind filters through the possibilities of what and who it could be, contacting me. Is it a text? From whom? Work or personal? Or is it an e-mail? On my personal or work-mobile account? A game then begins of whether to wait to see or to go ahead and check it right when it comes. If it’s a text, I look right away. E-mail, I may wait. Unless I’m hoping for a message from an old or a new friend. Then if it is from such a friend, there’s an internalized smile and hopeful anticipation. If it’s an advertisement or not from the one I’ve fixated on for some reason, then there’s a wave of disappointment, even a mental calculation of trustworthiness of connection or relationship. Like I said, completely mental. What waste of time and energy do I spend daily on this mind-mania?

I got my first cell phone about six years ago, when I was beginning a new job, with a new commute, as was my husband. It amazes me to think it was only about six or seven years ago, at most. I became a big-sister figure for two young women, adolescent-age, one of whom taught me how to text. Then another friend and I developed an intense connection, fed in part by immediate access to one another via texts. For a period of years, this seemed a normal state of affairs. But bit by bit, the cell-phone became a bit of a leash, both of mind and of breath. Not responding within minutes became a relational statement, whether of work or personal life. Mental space became conditioned by the technological input about to arrive. Habits of mind became narrower and narrower. Relationships of trust became increasingly distrusted when differences emerged around cell-phone habits.

So why do so many of us tether ourselves to connectivity 24/7? What do we receive in such ways, and what do we give up, whether aware of it or not? For my part, I am aware of a heightened receptivity to internal connections with more people, independent of time, location, profession. I value connection, feeling related or connected to those within and beyond my circle. I love the charge that comes when connection with unexpected, non-geographical friends appears in my cell-phone window. But there’s also a heightened energy of some kind, at least with some. A quiet intimacy, with a nuance of secrecy? An erotic character—sensual, not sexual; enlivening, not attractive? I’m not sure in some cases, and it varies in others. There’s something significant about the cell phone being purely mine, a private device on which I receive messages only I have access to. My e-mail addresses are like that, but a computer differs from a cell phone. Perhaps a cell phone is small enough to become an extension of my own body. A computer is clearly an outside object. In any case, I live into wild permutations of relationship—up and down, inside and out—sometimes with no actual communication or contact with the (then) object of my attention.

Again, I can only speak for my part, but the cell-phone has also challenged my sense of contemplative practice, contemplative values. For every moment of ‘connected-charge’ I receive, I lose peace of mind and clarity of focus for work and life I value. When I am able to disconnect for even two-three hours at a time, I breathe differently. I can sense an opening that reminds me how corralled I feel in being so responsive, so effectively connected with colleagues and even friends I trust. Yet I feel a sense of loss too. As a college friend would say, from time to time, “My inclusion needs are not being met!” When I intentionally disconnect to live into the contemplative path, I feel a loss too.

All I wanted here, I guess, was an avenue to name this phenomenon for myself, perhaps get a better handle on its instigation of monkey minded behaviors. I smile at the ability to have entire relationships with figments of my imagination, and am reminded once again that our experience is intimately connected to our thoughts. I wonder if one day, there will be cell-phone counselors in the future, well-suited and professionally trained to counsel us in our relationships with—lived commitments to—our cell phones…?

For now, I intend to trust the actual conversations I have with folks, face to face, and patiently practice my way into a purely functional relationship with my phone. It could happen. My phone just buzzed and it’ll wait until morning.