Alice climbed out of bed and made ready for her morning run.
This was her weekday ritual. Before catching her bus to work she would get into her running gear, do a little warm up to the end of the street, cross over the main road, run through the park and out onto the sealed path that ran parallel to the coast. She would do five kilometres, ending at the Surf Club, take a short break, and then make her way back. She loved these runs and the weather today was just perfect. Once she was on the coastal track she would use earplugs to listen to music.
As she felt around in her small back-pack she had strapped behind her, she found her music player but was annoyed to find she had forgotten her mobile phone! She could see it now on the dresser; how dumb was that? Things went from bad to worse when she found the player’s batteries were flat. No music, no phone, she was tempted to go back but that didn’t make sense, and it would certainly make her late for work. So, she decided to carry on with her run. After all, that was the main point of it, wasn’t it? Wasn’t this the whole reason for getting up that little bit earlier in the mornings? Yes; the run was the main thing; the thing she really enjoyed doing.
As Alice ran along beside the sea, she could hear the rhythm of the waves washing in below. It was a soothing sound and she felt tempted to run down to the beach. She made her turn around point and rested a while to catch her breath. As she started back she found the desire to spend just a minute or two, watching and listening to the waves that she could only hear from the path. She finally relented, stopped and rested for a moment before climbing down through sand and rocks to get a view of the coast. She settled down just short of the beach in a cranny of rocks. She was virtually unseen here and it was shady, out of the wind and giving her a perfect view.
Alice sat very still, taking in the beauty of the scene spread out before her; she listened to the soothing sounds of the waves breaking on the beach and breathed in the smell of the salty sea air. She closed her eyes. This was heaven! It was peace. It was… a kind of tranquillity that swept over her with nothing else happening or pushing its way into her life. She felt a sense of freedom. No phone, no music… but right now, no clocks, no TV, no home computer, no intrusions, no people. She was disconnected. It was a wonderful feeling and it brought about a sense that her life should be looked at, analysed even. Had she the time? Of course she had the time. She would phone in sick when she got back. She liked her work at the office and had always done well in her job; there would be no problem taking a day off.
Bit by bit she looked at her current life. She had been feeling a kind of information overload for several months now without stopping to think about it. In her private life she was finding it more and more difficult to make decisions while being bombarded with too much information. Her phone was a classic example. It was loaded with so many apps, and she no longer looked at most of them. She would definitely thin that right down… or better still, strip the apps out and take it right back to simply being a phone again! Wow! She could do that. At the same time go through her enormous list of contacts and reduce it to those few people important in her life.
She thought about Colin. They had been dating for months but it wasn’t going anywhere and she knew it. They were supposed to go to a nightclub in the city tomorrow night; she would cancel. It would be a start. Let him down gently. The more she thought about it all, the more things she thought of that she needed to change.
After a couple more hours of soul-searching her head was full of stuff. She climbed back up, ran home, phoned in sick, got hold of a common or garden pencil and a piece of paper and started a to-do list.