Not always. Not as a policy. Just once, on a Wednesday afternoon when I was at the water and the phone rang and I looked at it and knew it was not an emergency, knew the difference between the ring that requires me and the ring that can wait, and I chose the water.
I let it ring.
This sounds like a small thing. For someone else it might be a small thing. For a woman who has been available by phone, by email, by the particular telepathy of a mother and a caregiver who is always slightly listening for the thing that needs her, always with some part of her attention allocated to the incoming, always at some level on call even when officially off, letting the phone ring was not a small thing. It was the size of a decision. It was the conscious choosing of the present over the available, which I have not always been willing to do.
The water was doing its thing.
The particular late-afternoon thing it does in October, the light going bronze and the surface catching it in the way that surfaces catch certain lights, making something beautiful out of the angle and the hour and the temperature of the air. I was standing in it. I was present in it. The phone rang and I looked at it and I put it back in my pocket and I looked at the water and the water did not know I had made a choice but I knew, and the knowing had a quality to it that I am still trying to name, something like reclamation, something like: this hour is mine, this water is mine, this particular bronze October light is mine and I am standing in it, fully, without the phone, without the incoming, without the part of me that is always slightly elsewhere managing the needs of the always-next thing.
I called back from the car.
Everything was fine. It was not an emergency. It was a call that could wait and waited and the world continued while it waited and I had had the water and the bronze light and the choice and none of that was taken from me by the waiting.
I am going to let it ring again.
I am going to let it ring more. I am going to practise the putting-back-in-the-pocket until it becomes a reflex, until the default is presence first and availability second, until the water gets as much of me as the phone has been getting for the last twenty years.
