Are you missing something?

I was driving to my new job the other day and forgot to set turn-by-turn directions on my phone.

I’d driven there a few times, so I had a vague idea about how to get there. But without a guide, I wasn’t definitively sure which roads to take.

After my trail of certainty ran out, I suddenly started paying much more attention to where I was. I read every sign I passed and began mentally asking myself if I’d seen the dozen or so navigational ‘marks’ along my route.

Is that the road I should take? Have I seen that blue midcentury house on the right? What about the megasque-church over there? Have I been here before?

Driving with a guide allows you to filter out many of the things that you would ordinarily have to pay attention to to go from point A to point B. Instead, gps allows you to simply follow navigational steps in relation to where you are. This allows you to merely follow directions as it were, and instead pay attention to other things like the podcast you were listening to or your conversation with your spouse.

By learning to "follow-directions", we learn to get where we're going while also (ironically) un-learning how we would previously have learned to get there. 

This is not unlike the relationship we have with our phones.

Certainly, there’s an opportunity cost to all the time we spend glued to our screens. Paying attention to what’s happening in there takes our attention away from something elsewhere.

What that is might be as different for you as it is for me. But irregardless, you’re likely missing out on something, and, in the process, building a habit around ignoring it altogether.

What might life be like if we were less distracted by what was going on our screens and more concerned with the (mundane) moments of everyday experience? What would we see, feel, hear or learn? Where would it take us?

Worth a pause.