The other day we looked at how the subjective experience of doing exercise can be identical, no matter one’s level of fitness: It never gets any easier.
And almost as soon as I’d written that one, life presented me with a totally different scenario that pointed to the same thing, but in a different way.
It was the settings on my daughter’s new phone.
📲
She started at ‘big school’ this year, and walks in on her own, so a mobile phone was always on the cards. (I mean, she’s only been asking for one for about the last 5 years 😂)
She has no need for anything fancy, so we plumped for The Phone (it’s literally called ‘The Phone’), which looks like a smartphone, but does nothing other than make calls and send texts. No camera, no internet, no apps, no games, no social media, no music, no location tracking, no nothing.
She loves it! (And it gets ignored 95% of the time, which is perfect.)
Keyboard clicks
There are only a few tweaks you can make in the settings and one thing she switched off immediately was the tactile feedback when typing on the keyboard, as she can’t stand it.
Now, we’d jumped on the bandwagon fairly early and received a loaner ‘version 1’ of The Phone during the summer, as they were in the process of bringing out a ‘version 2’, which arrived just the other day.
Trouble is, in the interim, there had been a security update to the software that, for reasons known only to the company themselves, disabled some settings; the tactile-keyboard-toggle included.
You could still tap on the Settings menu, and it would still take you through to the screen with the requisite switch, but then, in the blink of an eye, it would be gone again and you’d be taken back to the previous screen.
The first I learned about it was a frustrated wail emanating from the lounge, as she was setting it up,
“Daaaaaaad! I think my new phone’s broken – it won’t let me switch off the buzzing keyboard!”
I looked into it, saw it wasn’t possible, emailed Support and they replied very quickly to let me that they’d disabled it deliberately, and why. I relayed all of this to my daughter and she decided that non-buzzy keys were such a dealbreaker, she’d rather keep the v1 Phone and send the v2 Phone back.
🤷🏻♀️
Ok, I think, but let’s see if I can hit that toggle real quick and switch keyboard clicks off for her; score some brilliant-daddy points.
Agile digits
It was like a game designed to test the reflexes. You had to memorise where exactly on the screen the two tap targets you needed to hit in quick succession were situated, then limber up and attempt it as quickly as you could.
Additional challenge was provided by the fact that there didn’t seem to be a standard length of time for the screen to appear before it disappeared again, meaning that sometimes you wouldn’t even get through to the toggle, and on other tries you got your finger to it, but just not long enough to actually do anything with it.
I spent a good 20 minutes trying though, and frustrated wails started emanating from my office, too.
Eventually I gave up. I’d given it my best shot, but it simply wasn’t possible. They’d told me that the setting had been disabled, and my experiments had confirmed this. We’d have to return the new phone and keep the old one.
I came down to demonstrate to my daughter exactly what the problem was, then went back upstairs to locate the box, to start the returns process, while the Giles Ego Construct 📦 bemoaned the fact that it wasn’t getting any of this faffing-around time back.
Literally one minute later, she’s bounded up the stairs and is stood there next to me, with the phone in her hand and a huge grin on her face.
“I did it!”
Her quick little fingers had hit the toggle and switched off keyboard clicks, effortlessly.
🤯
Here it is again
It’s (now) clear that these 53-year old reflexes cannot match my daughter’s 11-year old ones, but until she’d managed the feat, I was blissfully unaware of this fact.
Performing the quick-tap-task I didn’t feel like I’d ‘lost my edge’ or anything, because what I was actually experiencing, there and then, was just that moment’s thought-created reality.
That’s all we get.
Change is happening all the time, but what we experience is ‘this’.
The objective measures, the comparisons, the ‘shoulds’, the gold standards, the hierarchies – yes, they’re real (I’m definitely slower than an 11yo), but it’s almost as if they’re just a layer of abstraction that’s laid over our actual experience of ‘this’; of Now.
They’re a story, into which our actual experience fits.
Anyway, I found the whole episode to be fascinating, and it gave me a refreshed perspective on the notion of ‘doing your best’!
💟
Giles
p.s. I’m genuinely looking forward to the day when she kicks my ass on an Alpine climb 🚵🏻♀️
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Giles P Croft