sliding door moments

By the mere fact that you are reading this blog it means you are on a smartphone, an iPad, or on your computer. A device that lets you connect to the Internet and go to a webpage. I love all my blog readers and followers, but for today I am going to tell you, read this blog today, watch the video below, and then turn it off for the day, or better yet, pick a day of the week to put your phone away, or a day a month, or if that might be hard for you, start by putting your phone down for an hour a day, and maybe gradually increase that to more and more time.

Some of you might have already seen this video, or it has been displayed on your Facebook or Twitter feed. Regardless I encourage you to watch it again and think about how many opportunities have you lost because you were too busy reading emails, scanning your Facebook feed, sending a tweet, or posting to your Pinterest board? I am just as much to blame. Yesterday I was at a conference and found myself in and out of a distracted mind between work emails, the presentations, and feeling completely out of it. I took ideas away from the day, but what if I had just turned my phone off? How many times are you in meetings and you see the same behavior (yourself or others) throughout the day?

I have written before about Sliding Doors moments, and I wonder if our phone is often that train that means that because our head is down, or our focus is off, that we miss out on important eye contact, fun moments, and maybe worse of all I wonder if our distraction actually makes others not trust us. Do we ever lead people to think that our phone is more important than they are to us? Yikes. There are times when Chris and I will go out to a nice restaurant and have somehow over time built a pact that we are there to be together – aka – no phones.

Watch this poetic way of getting us to realize how many moments we miss each day.

One of my favorite movies is Sliding Doors. When I first saw it I had short hair so I was completely into Gwyneth Paltrow’s short hair style. Yes, that was just the icing. Really I was engulfed in the story that the closing of a train door could completely change your life. You could miss that closing door, and it meant potentially not finding out that your boyfriend was cheating on you. (A story line in the movie).

I think of Sliding Doors often in my day-to-day life. Will this decision impact that decision? Will I regret it later? There have been many of those moments in my life. Taking a specific job, moving across the country, almost every decision we make could be a Sliding Door moment. Even some negative experiences we have can be Sliding Door moments, all based on how we react or respond to the situation.

I have one that I will not forget. I am not going to go into the details of the bad experience, but one night almost 12 years ago, a Sliding Door moment changed my life. I do not know if I would be sitting here writing this with Chris sitting ten feet away from me. That moment meant that instead of doing whatever I would have done that night, I was with Chris, and the conversation, love and support I received from him shifted something inside me and I was never the same again. One door shut and another was opened. I am not sure I would have seen the door open for me otherwise.

The rest is history.

If you have not seen the movie Sliding Doors, I encourage you to Red Box, Netflix, or borrow it from your local library. You will not be disappointed.