IMPORTANCE OF RECONNECTION

HOW FRUSTRATIONS OF WRESTLING WITH TECHNOLOGY ILLUMINATE THE BENEFITS OF SLOWING DOWN

Ifind it’s often a challenge to come up with a topic to write about each week for these articles, not that there isn’t a lot that we could write about, more a case of choosing something that might be of interest, helpful and applicable to those reading.

Engaging with a broad demographic means we may not always be writing about something of immediate benefit or interest to everyone and some of what we write about may challenge some people’s thinking; but we can’t predict the impact in advance.

So, I had a chuckle to myself as I was deciding what to write about this week because I’d already chosen the topic of connection.

My original intention for content was quite different to what I am now sharing, but more of that later because circumstances changed.

As I was pondering on connection in general, while also needing to work through my to-do list, my speed of access to the internet slowed down dramatically, which can be annoying to say the least particularly when we rely so heavily on it and so many of our files are in the cloud.

However, that happens quite a lot and generally coincides with students returning from school; it was particularly bad when everyone had to home school.

This time was different though. I chose the usual restart approach, which seems to fix most things, and it did this time. But sure enough, within half an hour the same thing happened. And again, and again, and again.

I’m generally very calm about everything but could feel myself going into reaction mode as there were many things I needed to get to. So, again a typical strategy, I walked away, wandered around the garden, breathed and returned.

It helped but this cycle of slowing down, restarting, walking and breathing, carried on for a couple of days, was slowing everything down, particularly my ability to be productive.

I then remembered that there had been some of other “connection” problems over the last couple of weeks.

We had received several emails from various providers letting us know of changes that had been made to some of our accounts which hadn’t been requested by us. None of them was major, fortunately, however each one took time and patience to unravel and set right and some I’m still working on; I recognised that I was becoming impatient at times as I just wanted to fix them and move on with more “important” things.

What am to make of all of this? I came back to Einstein’s theory that “everything is energy” and, therefore, so are we. And the energy we bring to what we are doing at any given moment, for example pushing rather than allowing, rushing rather than being in flow, affects everything and everyone around us; here’s what I mean.

Back to the internet connection example, all examples really.

On one level it seems to be technology, something to blame and frustrate us, yet, when I take it deeper, I can acknowledge that I was rushing and wanted to get things done in a certain time frame.

The message I now take from the slow connection and other problems taking time, was that I needed to slow down, settle, move away, take a breath and reconnect to me and in doing that the problem resolved itself. I can be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes!

I suggest that all of the examples are reminders for me, and perhaps for you too, about the importance of staying connected, internally and externally – self, others and the world around us.

What messages have you been receiving recently that could indicate it’s time for you to do the same?