Physical Intelligence - Day 56

It is not often that I promise someone that I will be ride for an early morning trip. let alone three people and never three people who are young students, who I have directed to a meeting point.  Being this is not typical and unusual for me, as I got to bed and in the darkness, a thought occurred to me, what happens if I mess up?  What happens if I oversleep and have three young kids all wondering where the heck I am, one of which has bused in from a distant town.

The net result was that the more I thought about things going badly south, the harder it became for me to sleep and the irony was that as this thought kept me awake at night,  each hour awake made the possibility of messing up that much more closer and that much more real, which only served to make me more alert and now I am caught in a spiral of unhelpful thinking, but fortunately the counting sheep trick actually worked finally but not before the window for sleeping was cut down to 4 hours.

It was a mighty relief that everything went according to plan and I had fulfilled my obligation and did not disappoint anyone or mess up in the way I feared.  This just shows how fragile thought is when it is allowed to compound on itself and how having great intent actually serves to take us diametrically opposite to the goal we intended and into the world of unintended consequence.

This was not me driving my own kids, because those kids just need to bang on my door and let me know that I am still sleeping.  It also shows the pitfalls of rejecting having a cell phone.  In this day and age, mobile communications is the very lifeline that extends our abilities to relate and network.  The reality that was keeping me up was a sense of disconnection.  The lesson here is how mobile communication can knit the physical together.  The irony is that if I am at a hotel, what I would have done is call reception and ask them to give me a morning wake up call, because in a hotel situation it is business people who are waiting for me.

So it was that the mobile phone would have acted like the backup protection of a hotel reception, except it is the students who had the opportunity to provide me the wake up call.  There is however one draw back with mobile communication, which is to receive alert messages during the night.  It would be cool to know if it is possible to set the phone to accept a particular number or set of numbers and bar every other call, text or mobile sound.   That is the drawback with mobile, I still view it as an tool of interruption and not a tool of connection.

My long insistence of my "no cellular" way of life is finally being tested to the hilt.  So long as the conveniences begin to outweigh the inconveniences, the physical connection that mobile provides is becoming an important consideration, but this physical connection only makes sense when I have full control of who it is who can call me at night and set that as a temporary selection.  I still greatly value my own privacy but in situations like last night, there is pause for thought what mobile communication can do to create a smarter physical reality, so at least the schedule for this morning has pointed me to new considerations.