CREATING SMALL REVOLUTIONS OF JOY ONE DAY AT A TIME

How To Get The Answers You Need Without Pulling Out Your Phone

Laura Schwindt
2 min readMay 5, 2020

The lost art of downtime and how it’s destroying our self-awareness.

For my birthday this year, I told my family I wanted to go on a good old fashioned hike together.

We decided on a familiar hike we had done before and set a time to meet. Once we arrived we noticed a big metal gate with 3 thick chains padlocked together blocking the road to the trailhead.

Normally, one of us would have pulled up a map on our phone so we could re-route ourselves to an alternative option.

However, there was no cell service where we were and we had two options:

  1. Drive back to where we could get cell service and plan a new route.
  2. Put our phones away, trust our instinct, and forge our own path.

It seems we have become accustomed to pulling out our phones as soon as we have a question about something. “Siri, show me gas stations near me.” “Siri, what day is Mother’s Day in 2020?”

Although this is helpful when you quickly need the calculator or would like to check the weather, it can be a real detriment to finding answers to some of the deeper questions we should be asking…

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Laura Schwindt

Woman Dentist Burnout Prevention Coach. Retired dentist, mother and vegan athlete. Dedicated to helping women create more life balance.https://bit.ly/LASchwindt