I tried for the first time this weekend to not read email.
I did a great job for the most part. I felt fully in my experience of bike riding along the ocean with my boyfriend and eating clam strips at the old school restaurant Old Tony’s on the pier at Redondo Beach. Without reading email or being on my phone for any reason, the world around me felt crisp, and ripe with the transitory vacillation of the now and the past, which could be yesterday or forty years ago. I was acutely aware of the sounds and sensations around me, and very focused on the detailed acuteness of our experience together. The human mind is an accordion folders of information, on the ready to be curated and activated. Organizing what feels good and where we could be tripped up by a dynamic. If you think about the vastness of the articulation of any given moment, it makes life sweet, delicate and robust all at the same time. Yet we think as a society that what our phone or email holds has the heft of our livelihood.
I am far from a scientist. Heck, I am so impressed I can make a fake egg if need be that I don’t need to prove I know much more about weight, gravity, density or velocity. What I do crave knowledge about is the untapped potential of the brain. In my limited understanding of our brain’s capacity, I can conjecture that if we actually put our time and energy into unearthing the magnitude of the power of the brain, we would be communicating and evolving light years beyond our conditioned response to the email ding. Think about its archaic quality for a moment. One human writing from their limited conscious capacity to another human and pressing send. That’s it on face value. As a writer, I love the idea of a witty repartee through email but usually it is a medium that can be misunderstood, judged, used against you, ignored, overwritten, embellished, called in an Exhibit A in a lawsuit, forwarded by accident, misread, widely distributed against one’s will and the ending of friendships and romances. So why, on a beautifully sunny Saturday with one of my favorite people in the world looking at the ocean eating a fried clam strip would I even think to open my email?
But people open email in their fun social free time all day long. I used to be one of them. Checking my email at stop lights, thinking that one answer to that one question will alter my reality significantly, which makes one co-dependent on their email to fulfill them and make them happy. I could say the same for text messages, but ultimately I have really watered the text message down to replying on logistics and reiterating what was already verbalized as a sentiment in-person.
When a text message starts to go in the direction of What did you mean? Or How could you say that? I immediately call. We are dealing with words, emotions and technology. They don’t mix well. We are eliminating the time of processing humans need in the space of their brains categorizing and accessing modicums of safety and the dispersment of an adequate response in accordance of who they feel capable of being in that ultimate minute.
Our brain knows so much more about us, the world, reality, what we want. Our brain is ready to lead us to what we want and need, and I find it very hard to wrap my mind around the fact that it is email. Here are some scenarios where weekend emails baffle me:
You win something important like an award and they let you know by email, but because you didn’t respond by the end of the weekend, they gave the award to someone else. Frankly, that means to me the award was hardly anything worth coveting and they can have their award.
Someone deciding whether they want to work with you or not, and asking you to answer some questions over the weekend, and if you don’t reply by Monday then in some hot headed reply they claim you must not value their business and they moved on to someone else. I call that dodging a bullet.
Your child forwarding you an email on Friday night for a deadline of their college application which is due by Sunday night (although had a real lead time of a month) and proceeded to sit next to you on the couch all weekend and never mentioned the gravity of the time crunch of the email.
An email from a bank or credit card telling you there is fraud on your account. The way I look at this is, if you didn’t call or text me, you can deal with the problem and I will be expecting that money back in my account and with all the Phishing scams, why would I believe email messages anyway, never mind respond?
These are just a few of the examples to exemplify what email can represent which is super pedestrian and annoying. I frankly am not down with being dominated by my email anymore. I would rather look to the stars, the moon, the galaxies, the flow of energy in the course of any day of who I run into or meet to dictate where my communication goes. I definitely don’t want to be dominated or led by this little rectangular box that fills with horizontal lines of information with a blue dot as unread to the left of it. Talk about inciting a desire to hit yourself over the head with a waffle iron.
I know many many people have jobs where they have to read emails all day long. I understand this is out of your power to stop. But please do yourself a favor and from Friday to Monday don’t open the email program. Instead, focus on the power and capacity of the unused parts of your brain and even if it feels like the daftness of an eggplant, see what transpires over time. This is not meditation. This is just being in a Zen state of doing nothing, when you don’t check email.