Today is a thought of the walk on being always available. What is the thought of the walk? Well, every so often I take my dogs for a walk. This clears the mind and opens me up for thought. These short, one-topic episodes are simply my way to share thoughts with you and invite your feedback. Schedule for the next two weeks. Webinar on April 27, 2021, 7pm CT: Relocation Roundtable Main topic of today's show: TOTW on Availability The text message comes in and my notices are off for the night. I have no idea it happened. The next morning when I wake up, what has started as an unanswered question has ended with an apology for offending me. But I am not offended - I was just asleep. I reply with that information. This happens to me about 4 times a week. It is why my phone has silent hours programmed into it. It happens when I do not answer emails immediately. It happens when I do not pick up the phone. We have come to expect the people we are seeking to reach immediately and if we do not, we tell ourselves a story about why. We allow our insecurities to taint the story toward the other party either being angry, offended, or dead. Our story is usually wrong.  Always Available. The expectation is of always available. This unhealthy culture fostered by tech giants, buy the devices that were supposed to set us free, and by an increasingly entitled population. Saturday night at midnight, you realize something you bought on Amazon is broken and you hop online to return it. You use their customer support chat feature and someone processed the refund right away. You post something for sale on Facebook marketplace and someone sends you a message at 2 in the morning. By the time you wake up, Facebook has reminded you to answer it multiple times. Being always available is an expectation for some but it is also at the root of the following things: Taking too much time to do something due to multiple interruptions Inability to sleep/get to sleep at night Loss of closeness in relationships with our children, and pretty much anyone we spend time with Inability to create space for mental and spiritual development Getting fat Car accidents Neglecting that which is most important It is one thing to be the person who is paid to be “always available” on night shift for a set period of time. It is quite another to be always available in every moment of your every day. We sometimes look fondly at the past and romanticize how it was back then. But on the topic of being always available, the 80s had something going for them: the person you were trying to reach had to be home to pick up the phone. If they were on the toilet when it rang, it was unlikely they could finish and race to the wall into which the phone was plugged in to answer. We pretty much were accustomed to waiting for a callback without being offended.  And there was a negative aspect to this: When the phone rang, you pretty much dropped everything to get it. And that set the foundation for an expectation of being always available as cell phones became ubiquitous in our lives. We took a thing that needed an immediate response to connect us to loved ones and information -- or you had to take more action to connect -- and we made it possible to carry said item in our pockets everywhere without removing the expectation that we immediately respond to calls. Then we added text. Then email. Then calendar notices. Then chat apps and social media. The cellphone is basically a tiny, mobile computer at this point, not really just a phone and the expectation is that because we can carry it around, we should respond to any of the 20 or so ways people have to reach us. And this is causing a terrible communication problem. If you can reach someone in 20 ways, you might as well not reach them at all because you are now depending on their built-in computer -- the brain -- to remember that chat you had, or the text you sent, or that long email they skimmed, or your comment on facebook. Always available has