I really have a love/hate relationship
with that small metal box a.k.a my cell phone, that is glued to a 2 ft radius
of me at all times. On the love
side, it helps me stay in touch with loved ones despite living far away from
some people, or in this case, traveling thousands of miles away. It also makes my job easier. I can look up drug doses within
seconds, calculate BMI easily, access a calculator for math I’m too busy to do
by hand and when connected to the internet, I have the whole world of medical
research at my fingertips. It also
allows me to digitally immortalize memories – thousands of them if I wanted by
taking photos of the people, places and things I see. For the most part, these are positive attributes of those
cell phones we all carry around and probably the reason we justify never being
without them.
Now onto the hate part of my
relationship with that inanimate object… First off, I feel too dependent on
this thing. I get worried when the
power level starts to fall below 30-40%... thoughts race through my mind like
“what if it dies and someone tries to call me?” Or “what if I get lost and my phone dies and I don’t
have the GPS to get back?” Second, I’m increasingly aware of how distracting my
phone is. Have you ever looked
around a room and counted how many people are on their phone at a given
moment? Whether we are in a
meeting or a restaurant or a lecture or the line at the grocery store, it’s
rare that I don’t see at least a few people on their phones. There are TONS of things to distract us from e-mails to social media to news articles to stock market trends
to games. It’s easy to pass time
on those small boxes. And I’m as
guilty as they come when it comes to this. Today when I got in the back of the truck to go to clinic,
the first thing I did was grab my phone to start doing who knows what to occupy
my time. And for a few moments my
head was down and I was focused on the shining light emanating from that little
box again. But then I happened to
look up and realize what beautiful scenery I was missing! I’m in another country for crying out
loud! What could possibly be
more important in this moment in a small little box than absorbing the new
sights of the new landscapes around me?!
There are native Hondurans sitting next to me that I could talk to and
learn about their country, culture and personal stories. I put my phone down and started to
observe my surroundings more.
This addiction to our smart phones
is not isolated to the first world.
As I looked around in the evening at our Honduran colleagues, I saw many
of them passing the time on their phones as well. Only in the rural villages did it take some effort to find
people on their phones. On more
than one occasion I passed by groups of kids playing soccer and people just
taking time to sit in front of their homes and gaze out. There is something refreshing about
this simplicity. I decided that
going forward, I would focus more on putting aside that pesky device I have a
love/hate relationship with, and just work on being more present in moment.
- Christina Kinnevey, global health fellow
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