7 things that changed since phone gone

1. I started taking notes on paper again.

When I see my words mapped out on paper, I think about how useless handwriting identification would be in my case. Sometimes I see my hands produce what looks like a stereotypical pharmacist’s scribble. Then there are times when the paper is filled with bold, architectural lettering by the time I’m done writing.

2. I listen to whatever is playing in the minibusses I ride.

I continue to use public transportation. So, my ears are at the mercy of the minibus driver. If he decides to blast out a drum-laden song through his bus’s struggling speakers, then drums are what I listen to. If they play a song by Mahmood or Telahun, it’s a nicer journey for me.

Now if the driver wants to make sure everyone outside the minibus knows that we’re all listening to an interviewer and her guest arguing about the alarming number of deaths caused by open ditches and potholes, I can only perk up my ears and fulfill his wish.

There is nothing to play music from, nothing I can do about what enters my ears and what doesn’t. Having less minor choices to make is quite liberating though.

3. I sit straight more often.

I remember dad looking at my side profile and trying to ‘fix’ whatever was going on with my neck. He said that my head does not sit on my neck straight. It kind of bends forward. He tried to push my head back while holding my neck in place. He thought the position was just a result of my bad posture habit. But the ‘habit’ kind of stuck. I mean he’s right. And yet, I didn’t do much to reverse the minor bodily damage it caused. Even when I’m not using my phone, I’m always hunched over in a mother-in-crisis position to protect the bag my phone is in. And also, I continued to hunch over my laptop, a book, a newspaper, my lunch, but honestly, I think it was mostly my phone.

Now that I have nothing to look down at, I noticed myself keeping my head upright and taking notice of everything around me. If some crime takes place in front of me, I will probably be a more helpful witness for the case.

4. Less headphone time=Less headaches

This is a correlation that I always thought of but never wanted to admit. I really like my music and sermons and podcasts on the road. But I noticed that two hours of that left my head hurting quite often.

5. I read more

I take books with me nowadays. Once or twice, it was a hard-copy of a Bible that I had with me and I finished the short book of Ecclesiastes on that. The other day, I reread Teju Cole Eight Letters to a Young Writer. Yesterday, I read a huge chunk of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic while waiting in line at an Ethiotelecom building. There were only about half the employees working then, so the queue leaked from the chairs available and poured out into the stairs outside. The book I was reading was about the hope of finding a miracle substance from the wasteland created by an alien visit. Whatever was on the page was wild. But I think reality beats it. The chaos and waiting in the hot room brought out a lot of reactions from people.

I feel like literature is at its best when it acts as a clean, honest mirror for the human condition. One can probably achieve that by writing about the real-life drama that unfolded in front of me at the telecommunication center. The author of Ecclesiastes had, for example, written about the toiling under the sun that humans do. And the Russian brothers tried to demonstrate the hope humans place on treacherous things.

I really think that humans are a species worth marveling at. I can do that more often with fewer distractions by devices like smartphones.

5.‘Time now’ is often at the top of my Google search results.

I try to estimate the time by observing the general behavior of shadows. When I needed the exact time to catch a class or something, I just Google ‘time now’ on my laptop.

7. I think more

I think less actually. But I think that the thoughts I get to go on longer, more consistent trails. And I remember hearing John Green say something about his year without social media. He said that because he can’t post his thoughts on Twitter now, those thoughts just remain ‘his’. He likes that. I think I get what he means by that. Just like him, I get bored more often nowadays. But since there’s nothing I can do about that, I just sit through it. And because our boredom has a quick fix and our questions have quick answers, I feel like there’s a lot of striving that people no longer have to do. Almost every daily urge has an instant solution. One calls to meet someone, instead of pagering or sending them letters. One does a single search online to find the answer to a question instead of having to go and shuffle through books and papers.

If we want to continue to be creative, maybe ‘easy’ is what we should resist now. I think that creativity comes from the gap between whatever one wants to see happen and that thing’s ‘coming to be’.

I want to-in John Green’s words-see what lies beyond the boredom.

Love,

-w