What If the Wifi Worked?
A little over a year into our coworking dynamic, closer than ever with my "work husband" Leo, he pulls up to the house.
I've already been to his house today. He told me he had a call-wall and wouldn't be down. But here he is.
On the porch he tells me, there's a power outage, he's still in the middle of his call, he heads to his desk in my house.
I recall that this is how we got into this beautiful mess in the first place.
A year ago his wifi was out for four days.
He worked from here, getting fed breakfast by Jennifer Holland every day (who, we joke, has a morning policy of "don't talk to me until I've had my farmhouse breakfast") and he realized how much more productive and easeful everything was with this nourishment.
This is the sticker of modern life—we have all this technology, all this resource to make it exactly how we want it, and we use it to make things terrible.
We've been conditioned to relate in ways that make relationships burdensome, and then we avoid relationships for the burden they represent. We have the technology to live independently, and in using it to do that, we have lost the technology to live interdependently.
We conflate freedom and independence, then writhe in loneliness.
It's relationship technology in action that has our happy home humming along like it does. It's relationship technology we apply to enjoy the time we spend together, to leverage our togetherness in ways that make everything easier and more fun.
Yet it was only when the technology of independence failed Leo for days on end that he found himself able to see the wealth here in interdependence.
What if the power hadn't gone out?
What if the wifi stayed strong?
Where would our little village be then?
We have allowed our lives to overlap, even where we "have to be responsible," even where "I can do this on my own."
Doing it by myself doesn't mean I have to be alone while it happens.
It isn't the most convenient thing, for some people's priorities, to have people in and out of the house all day every day.
But what the fuck is convenience about? What makes that the priority? Convenient for what? For someone in a hurry to somewhere else?
It's not convenient to cook an elaborate meal, but it's nourishing on many levels. It's not always convenient to have people in and out of the house, or to move the WFH setup to someone else's house, but it's nourishing on many levels.
The way we're using the technology of independence to be independent is killing us—worse, it's keeping us alive in a life that feels pointless.
The way we have to opt-in to all the inconvenience and potential burden of interdependence has us shying away from it, and then we are gripped only by loneliness, when we might be held in the arms of a loved one.
Please, love, know that relationships can be easy and sweet and nourishing. They can be inconvenient in material ways and NEVER inconvenient in emotional ways. The technology is here, as is the way of applying it to have a more intimate and connected experience.
Will you claim it for yourself?
