10 days offline - Did I miss anything?
Hardly anything of importance.
As my life situation finally allowed, I shortened my bucket list and went few weeks ago to a 10-day meditation retreat to India. As part of the package, upon arrival all connections to the world outside were cut off by simply confiscating our cell phones and other valuables. This silent retreat was a great experience as such, which I can recommend to anyone, but I am going into the details of it in this post.
As we were cut off from all connections to family, friends, TV, news and internet, I was curious to see, firstly how easy it was to adjust to being without all those connections, and secondly, how it was to come back to the real world after the retreat and see what had changed.
The first part was relatively easy. Although I am slightly addicted to reading news constantly from various sources, I noticed after few days that if you just do not have that access to the news constantly in your pocket, you do not miss reading news or watching TV shows actually at all. Despite all the 'heavy topics' developing in our world today, such as the war against ISIS, refugee crisis in Europe (where I live), crude oil price and the unstable state of the global economy, none of these came to my thoughts at once. I was actually just relieved that I did not "have to" engage my brains with this, mostly only miserable, information day after day. And sorry, but I did not either miss this community, my Facebook friends or any other online community a bit. What I really missed, a big time, was my family and my 'real life' friends. I do not mean that you cannot have great friends and relationships in online environment, but these do not come to same level as the friends you spend time in real world, laughing and crying together. There is always a difference.
Once the retreat was over and I started to reflect back to real world again, I quickly became to notice that changes were minimal, if anything at all. There was no gap in the news, the stories that were broadcasted were more or less the same as when I left. Of course, there was quite a bunch of unread emails waiting, but that was quickly resolved as I actually ended up just deleting most of these after reading only the headline, knowing that if someone really has something important to me they will chase again. I do not have yet really well developed on-line business either, but even if I had, I do not believe that it had suffered hardly at all from this disconnection.
Perhaps the most important lecture was to learn that nobody - not even my wife, kids or closest friends - had really missed me that much. Kids just played they normal games and noticed 'of, daddy is home again' and it continued as normally. I did not actually tell to any of my friends about this trip in advance at all, and while they noticed that I was away, they could well do without me in all the events we use to do together. And I am not saying this with any bitterness at all. This just revealed the fact that we are not at all so irreplaceable than we use to think we are. No matter what is your position at your company, although your input may be very important, your departure is hardly such that it could not be remedied by your colleagues doing your part. It is hard for our egos to swallow, but that's the way it is.
Have a great day and let you know how you reflect on this!
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Hi, welcome back :) That's definitely food for thought - I would like to think that my family would miss me!
Hi Jude. Thanks for reading. I hope my family still missed me at least a little. But I learnt that they can cope pretty well without be sticking around;)