The wife and I have been spending entirely too much time transfixed on the television set and world wide web. We don’t have cable, so I’m sure we spend far less time that the typical American family. However, we have recently spent a couple of evenings sans web and TV, and by way of that, a couple of relaxing and productive evenings. I’ve noticed myself in the last couple of months, looking forward on my drive home to what wonders Netflix has churned out with new instant movies, what may be in the Redbox or whether a new episode of (fill in the blank) has appeared on Hulu. Instead of spending the rare, quiet moments of my commute to myself processing the day I’ve had, praying or looking forward to the dinner I’ll share with my wife and the time we will spend together, I’m thinking about what the third member of our small family has in the way of entertainment.
I’m hoping and praying that over the next several months, we can learn some new habits. We are moving the computer upstairs into the future reading room/office — specifically during the week. This ensures that if you feel the need to check for something online, check email, etc… you must walk upstairs and basically sit in the room by yourself — it ensures that you really want to be up there and not just idling away. It is too easy with our current set-up, having the TV hooked into the computer and a wireless keyboard to just peruse the webs, to overspend time on blogs or facebook or find some other method of skipping out on reality.
Things that we’ve been avoiding due to this web/tv extravaganza: me putting in the necessary time it takes for proper learning of anatomy & physiology, the tidying of our home, missed conversations with my wife in which feelings go untold and views get expressed, books go unread, etc… So we put it to a vote, our little family of two on a walk last night. We voted that in the now, in these moments where we are gathering ourselves and preparing for our future, we want to model what our future lives will look like. Do these lives consist of nightly movies or time spent reading? Do we want our kids to know more about characters in movies than about their parents? Our wishes are not that we’ll become a completely unconnected family — we have too many friends living away from here or that we don’t regularly speak with on a daily basis. At the same time, we both spend eight hours a day plugged into a computer, do we really want the 3-4 hours we have to each other of an evening to be spent looking at a screen full of people we’ll never know? Do we want to watch a tv show or clean dishes? Do we want to facebook or finish a good book? Do we want to talk and pray together or would we rather catch the Parenthood from last week?
So, as for me and my small family, we are choosing to unplug during the week. We are choosing to be with one another, we are choosing the path of productivity, home cooked meals, a clean home and quiet moments. We are choosing a simpler life for the time being, we’ll still catch a movie on the weekend or check our work email of an evening if we’ve had a rough day at work. We aren’t choosing to go Amish (although I have a fondness for their way of life). We are choosing to take a walk after dinner and before the dishes, instead of filling those moments with a movie that we have already seen.
