Off Any Given Sunday.
Normally Sunday is a day of rest for me - both physically and mentally. Part of my rental rest includes a few hours of mindless channel surfing. Granted, channel surfing isn’t a world class sport in our house since we don’t have cable and all four and a half stations that we get come via circa 1968 rabbit ears.
One event that captures my attention on a Sunday afternoon while holding the cough down is golf. What other sport allows one to watch in a horizontal position and be lulled to sleep. I don’t mean this as an insult to golf. I love to watch golf. I stink at playing so I have a huge appreciation for it. But on a Sunday afternoon when I’m looking for a respite nothing works better than a whispering voice coming from the TV with play by play action from one shot to the next.
While that is the makeup of an ideal day of rest, yesterday was a bit different in the Dreier household. We didn’t get up and get our dose of political news. We didn’t fill idle time with weather reports. We didn’t even put a Veggie Tales video in while dinner was being prepared. All 40 inches of TV (that’s a 27 and a 13 inch) in our house remained off yesterday.
We didn’t start out the day declaring that is would be a TV-free Sunday. We simply found ourselves choosing activities which directed our attention elsewhere. I did a little painting. The kids did their version of painting. I cleaned out a few things from my closet. (That will be an entry at a later date.) I talked with my wife.
At the end of the day I have to say that I actually felt good. It’s not to say I didn’t get some visual stimulation from a multimedia experience. We listened to music. We danced. We even watched a small Grinch clip on YouTube. But, our time was much more intentional.
I did find myself being pulled to the TV after the boys were in bed and I was looking for my8-9 o’clock fix when I remembered that I has unplugged the TV I was headed towards. Our youngest has been intrigued by the on/off button so I nipped that in the bud. What I found interesting is that the idea that the TV was unplugged stopped me in my tracks and I ended up sitting in bed reading instead.
Today I think I’m a better person than I was yesterday all because I actually fed some good stuff into my mind. I used my time for better things. I might get used to this.
Stay tuned.
-Kyle Dreier