Pause, Re-Boot

“Yes, I’ve already unplugged the device and plugged it back in.”

     –     Steve Heston, on all of over 100 calls with our Internet / TV provider over the last three years

“Step off!  Take a deep breath.  Get your target.  Now, throw to it.”

–     Jim “Pete” Peterson, my high school baseball coach, and me, to every kid I’ve ever coached on the mound

It’s 2016.  The lights come on when I flip the switch.  When I am a bit chilly, I kick the thermostat up a couple degrees, and I hear the furnace kick in and I feel the warm air flow.  When I call you on the phone, I dial, it rings, you pick up — or you send me straight to voice mail, which is there every time if you don’t pick up.  Turn the faucet?  Water comes out.  Press the start button on the car?  Internal combustion occurs.

So why can I almost never count on my Internet provider / TV provider to provide, oh, I don’t know….the internet and TV?  Regardless, the whole process causes two thoughts in my large, misshapen noggin:

1.  How Blessed are we that we can take for granted light, heat, communication, water and transportation?  I mean, seriously, I grew up with a party-line phone (you can look it up, younger subscribers), and my babysitter had an outhouse and cooked and heated with a wood-burning stove.  Think back one more generation — and imagine their wonderment at the basic comforts that we get with the simple flip of a switch.  Compared to the vast majority of people on the planet — we’re amazingly Blessed.
2. As annoying it is that our internet and TV service seems less reliable than a water well in a rural community in a third-world country, the Groundhog Day of dealing with their horrible service does hold one lesson worth considering.  Will simply pausing and re-booting “the device” solve the problem?

Pace.  Pressure.  Busy-ness.  Full in-boxes.  Multi-tasking.  As Yoda might say, “Careful, we must be, not to wear these as a badge of honor.”

Of all the automatic responses our body employs — and there are thousands of them — breathing is probably the least strategically utilized.  When we stop and take a deep breath, we re-calibrate the machine.  When we count to three, we re-cast the feeling in the conversation and we impact the outcome by the simple gesture of being in the moment, thinking, and allowing some peace to weave it’s way in to the chaos.

Experiment for today:  Five times — at any time today — stop.  Step back.  Take a deep breath.  Pause to re-boot your mental machine.  Get your target back in focus.  And throw to it.  I’d love to hear how many more times the “pitch” goes where you aimed…