Last week I arrived home on a Friday afternoon to realise my iPhone screen was blank. Well this was inconvenient to say the least as I still had things to tick off my to-do list before saying goodbye to the work week and hello to the weekend.
I noticed the phone was quite hot and it occurred to me that it had been sitting in the sun on the passenger seat on the way home and had overheated. So when I got home I did what I always do and googled “overheating iPhone.” It seems this blank screen was not an uncommon problem and the Apple Toolbox simply stated “the iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it again.” And with that, it became apparent that it was not going to work again until it had cooled down.
This started me thinking… What is our “blank screen”? What are the signs we need to look out for to know when we need to “cool down”? I certainly felt that my own life had been heating up, and this incident with my phone made me think whether we really take notice of this. Perhaps at this time I needed to “cool down” before I kept moving on. In addition to work and family life, my mother had been in hospital for three weeks and one of our great consultants had resigned, kicking off a recruitment drive to make sure the business wheels kept turning. So as you can imagine, by the time Friday rolled around, things had heated up for me.
I had a weekend planned of the usual house catch up; looking to see what was in the pantry (if anything); ferrying kids around; preparing for the week, which included book week costumes and choosing a “poem for your pocket” for school; together with visiting my mother in hospital and perhaps fitting in some exercise. But as result of the message from my iPhone I actually just decided to “cool down”. I slept in, went to yoga, watched an episode of Suits (thank you Harvey and Donna), made pasta sauce and danced in my lounge room to Aretha Franklin. For me this was my cooling down. And with these things in place I was able to turn back on. We got ready for Book Week with Harry Potter and Agatha Oddly costumes, the poems were picked for their pockets, the pantry was replenished, and my mother was able to leave hospital for the day where we sat on our back deck in the sun eating pasta.
If it had not been for my iPhone “reminder” I don’t think I would have prioritised cooling down and would have kept going at full speed. It did not even take that much time for the “cooling down” process to kick in. I just had to remember to do it. Unfortunately my iPhone did not recover and did not turn back on, however luckily for me I WAS able to “cool down,” which placed me in a much better frame of mind to deal with this come Monday morning.
So in thinking about your signs to “cool down” – Do you even know what they are? And what you need to do to “cool down”? What is that first step you could take? Because surely, you don’t want to end up like my iPhone.