My habit got me

My usual habit of a morning, after I've woken up, done my meditations and drunk a cup of tea, is to turn on my lap top and check my emails. Partly this has to do with the fact that England is five hours ahead of my time, and South Africa six or seven, depending on summer time (6) or winter time (7). So I'm interested to connect with friends and family.

But this morning we had a two hour power outage. To my dismay it took me a good half hour to get my head around that and accept that we were cut off from any outside communication. This was also due to the fact that our ancient cell phone's battery is failing and only keeps a charge for a little while. i.e. it was dead.

Yes, we have a gas stove, but otherwise our household relies heavily on electricity. And that dependence is kind of scary.

As to the outside communication, I've decided we need to find out if we can buy a land line phone that doesn't need to be plugged into an electrical outlet. During the sweeping eastern North American outage of 2008, this was the only way I could be contacted with the news that my dad had died. How very grateful I was for that old-style phone.

So now I've decided to break this habit of early email checking. This will be my soul-strengthening exercise for the month of October.  I'll leave the moment of switching on till after breakfast and see how long it takes me to be cool with that.