What I am about to share with you is 100% true. My story is not fabricated or embellished for literary impact. What I will share with you is an actual account of events that finally made me fully appreciate the danger of smartphones if not used, well, smartly.
This is how I recall events transpiring at the end of last week.
I've been distracted lately. I have a lot going on in my life. Besides for my usual family and professional obligations, and this year add to that my training commitments, I am wrapping up a 9-year tenure as rabbi at my current synagogue. That alone brings quite an emotional response. So now I find myself trying to finalize plans for the next stage in my professional life, selling a house, packing a house, buying a house, moving (and all the emotion these developments bring to a family), the beginning of my racing season and my first ever triathlons, and finally, this small thing called the Ironman in just over 3 months.
Recently, two children of friends were confronted with health concerns more severe than the common cold. I had just received an email from one of these friends who was offering an update about his daughter, who was admitted to the hospital. At that moment, my concern for her well being was all that existed in my closed little world.
I was at the gym when I received the email. I had dropped my firstborn daughter for her tennis class and I was walking to the locker room to change into my swim suit for a training swim. Many of us have had those moment when, with our gaze averted towards our smartphones, we've failed to see the oncoming hazards before us. When I was hit from behind at a stop light last year, I was convinced the driver was texting because I sat at the light for a good 10 seconds before I felt the impact. It wasn't as if I stopped suddenly, leaving her insufficient time to react. And so, as I walked through the gym responding to my friend who was in crisis mode, I had no sense of the world around me.
It's been said that a victim senses impending doom a split second before traumatic incidents. As I sat in the driver's seat awaiting a green light, I looked into my rear-view mirror only long enough to know that I was about to be hit. And barely a fraction of a moment before I walked into the locker room, a dreadful sense of foreboding came over me. In the deepest recesses of my heart, I knew with certainty something wasn't quite right. That's when I looked up to see a woman standing at the mirror frantically pointing me back towards the door.
If you've ever jumped in freezing water, or witnessed an accident as it unfolded, or saw a child teeter on the edge and fall from the highest rung of a jungle gym, you know what it means to gasp viscerally and literally lose your breath. That's what I did in the very moment that I realized that I had walked straight into the women's locker room.
Fortunately for the women in the locker room at that time, I didn't see anything that the walls were meant to shield, but unfortunately for me, I lost my pride and deflated my ego as I retreated in panic. Mortified. This IronJew quickly melted into a pile of humiliated goo. I quickly ducked into the men's locker room, removed the hat from upon my head and changed my t-shirt. I wasn't sure how else to mask my appearance. If I had a beard, I would have shaved it. After hiding in the pool for 40 minutes, I sat in the darkest corner of the gym until my daughter's tennis class ended, at which point we made a break for the door and I drove home without once looking back.
Technology is both a wonderful and a horrible thing. It makes our lives more efficient and allows us to do things we never before thought imaginable, unless, of course, you grew up on the Jetsons. But technology also has a way of taking us out of the real world and away from reality. Sometimes we're so engrossed in our whatevers that we don't even see the world before us. So I beseech you, don't let yourself become another casualty of the dangers of the smartphone. God forbid you should experience what I have and be, forever, traumatized by the curses of the blessings of technology.
No irony, of course, that this posting, and in fact, this entire blog, was made possible by the gift of modern technology.
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