I did it accidentally at first. I walked out of the house with the dog tugging away at the leash, eager to go out for her afternoon walk. She pulled me farther and farther from the house and pretty soon I realized that I was missing something. My pockets didn’t feel as heavy as they usually did.
I reached my hands quickly into my pockets. Could it be a poop bag that I was missing? Nope, I had a whole roll. Was it my keys? No, had those too.
As I pressed my hands deeper into my pockets, realization dawned: my cell phone. That’s what I was missing! Should I go back? Instinctively I wanted to and almost turned. I was planning a forty-five minute walk with the dog. It’s not safe without my phone! That’s the instantaneous thought that went through my head. This is dangerous! The voice in my head said. What would my mother, my kids, my ex-husband say? They would say I’m being irresponsible. What if they want to get ahold of me? What if I don’t make it back?
Mind you, this is a forty-five minute walk around my neighborhood. I have a regular figure 8 pattern that the dog and I walk many afternoons, with my house as the pivot point of the 8. So I’m never more than 10 minutes from home.
Add to this that I did not have my kids on this day. They were staying with Darth.
So, I decided, as the dog sniffed her way across our snowy street, I guess I didn’t need to go back for the phone. But I still felt irresponsible anyway.
I also felt untethered, like my own leash had been ripped in two and now I was no longer being held to the thing that grounded me in this world. I was loose, alone, untied to any kind of identity. I had no ID card, credit card, or money with me. The only thing that identified me as me was an Apple Watch that is fairly useless without my phone nearby. What if I never return home? I wondered briefly. There was a part of me that thought it would be possible for me to forget who I was, forget where I lived, forget everything I am and even forget how to get home.
After all, I was untethered.
We kept on, the dog obsessed with sniffing the patches of yellow snow, me using the treat in my coat pocket to entice her forward. I live in the downtown of a major city, so there is no shortage of other people, cars, and dogs on my walks. But this time they were all connected to something that I was not – a man walking a black lab mix held his phone in front of his face. Music blared from a car in a parking lot. A woman ran into a school to pick up her child, cell phone in hand.
The world around me was quite loud, but mine, I was starting to realize, was strangely silent. My pocket wasn’t going to buzz with the latest motion that my Ring doorbell caught in front of my house. I wouldn’t see the latest message in the text chain of moms planning brunch. I’d miss out on the next funny groundhog meme sent by a friend. If Darth had car trouble, I wouldn’t know. If Belle needed help with her math homework via text, I wouldn’t be able to respond for the next 38 minutes.
What had I done?
The untethered feeling persisted. It was like diving underwater and holding your breath, hoping that you would make it back to the surface in time to take in air again, like there was a finite amount of time that I could be out of the house before I ran out of air. Still Lily meandered along. She pooped in the usual spot. She sniffed piles of snow that were gray with dirt and yellow with pee. She was complimented on being a pretty girl by a kind woman. She decided to go berserk on a miniature poodle that was one quarter of her size.
Other than the dog pulling me along by the leash and the need to put one foot in front of the other without falling, nothing else demanded my attention. I started to notice that my mind had grown quieter. My mind, which is usually working out problems and looking for new things to learn, a cognitive version of the Energizer bunny, wasn’t really thinking about anything. It didn’t have an agenda. It wasn’t trying to fix a problem or coming up with 10 things that I wanted to Google before dinner. It was just taking in the world that I look at each day. It was just being me.
I started to pay attention to my body. I noticed that – single-boobed babe that I am – my shoulders felt out of whack, the left more upright while the right sank down. Without a breast on the right side of my chest my muscles behave differently. I have to more consciously press one shoulder back than the other.
Once I evened out my shoulders, I felt my core sagging a little. I tightened that up too. With my shoulders back and core tight, I instantly felt better. More confident. Like a dog holding her tail high. Like I belonged in the world. With just a quarter of my walk left to go, I realized that I felt light and free.
It wasn’t that I would forget who I was on this walk. No. It was that I would remember. It’s not any device that gives me my identity. If anything, they take it away. As a busy mom and manager of a group of employees, I think it’s my job to be imminently available – just a text away. And how irresponsible to be unavailable to others! To effectively ignore them for a whole 45 minutes!
But by the end of my walk, I wasn’t thinking this way anymore. In fact, I think that a walk without a cell phone might be the self-care that overextended moms and women need. It’s a way of remembering who we are untethered to our things, our homes, our devices. It’s the ultimate reclaiming of our bodies and our time. It’s a powerful rebellion against all of the forces that are begging us to respond at all hours of the day.
And, it’s a reminder that we can walk out into the world with nothing but our bodies and still be okay. Still be us. Still be a Fierce Tit.
If you haven’t gone for a walk without your phone in awhile, I suggest that you try it. It might be uncomfortable at first, but by the end, I think you’ll be glad you did.