Hey Wait...How Did that November 30-Day Challenge Go?

I don’t do a really great job of documenting these 30-day challenges the way I had intended. But I have at the very least introduced them at the beginning of each month and then done a kind of post-mortem on them when I finish. It occurred to me this morning that I have not wrapped up November’s challenge in a blog post, so today seems like as good a day as any.

Upon reflection, 30 days of no television may have been the most successful experiment yet. I didn’t achieve the pure TV-free atmosphere which I had hoped for, but there were some definite benefits anyway. It began with me just noticing my own mindless tendencies which have evolved over the course of 40+ years. Sitting down and escaping when things become either too much (stressful) or too little (boring). Letting it be part of such a large portion of our family time whether as a centerpiece or as background noise. The need to watch certain shows...to keep up with the scripted lives of fictional characters...to the exclusion of writing my own script in my own life. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for escape now and then. Reality can stink and TV is a quick cheap way to take a break from it.  But all breaks must come to an end. And I think mine has. 3 days after the challenge is over and I’m still basically doing what I did during that 30 days.

As we approached the end of November, I lamented that it was coming to an end – as though I didn’t have control of it or something. Absurd. So I asked myself, What, if anything, did I miss that would require me to return to "normal"?

There are shows that are – or have been – truly compelling and thought-provoking for me. Shows like Frontline and Finding Our Roots with Henry Louis Gates which are obviously educational. But also shows like Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain that show me places and people to which I might otherwise never be exposed. And there has even been compelling fictional TV for me…Lost being chief among them. Since May of 2010, I’ve been on a search for something else like it and five years later I’m still searching. When great characters are combined with creative storytelling, I'm hooked. (Cue the 500 recommendations from the peanut gallery.) I own the entire series on DVD and I think we still have a DVD player somewhere. Maybe I should just watch it again – if I really feel the need to just watch for the sake of watching. But why? And is TV even the best source for visual storytelling anymore?

I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was essentially one entrepreneur asking another entrepreneur questions about life and career. The questions led to conversation and the whole episode was 1 hour and 45 minutes long. I knew this when I got into it so I really didn’t expect to listen to the whole thing. What I didn’t know before I hit play was that they would be drinking wine the whole time and how much humor that would infuse into what turned out to be an extremely provocative exchange. At one point, the conversation turned to friends they had who would claim to never watch TV. They would do so in a really self-righteous way that implied intellectual superiority or in a way that suggested they were just too busy and managed their time too well to fit in television. But then they would go on to find out that these same friends spend 6 hours a day watching YouTube videos.

Same thing, people.

I definitely didn’t want this experiment to turn me into someone like that and I could completely be a candidate (hopefully minus the self-righteousness) since I replaced a lot of TV time with all kinds of Internet time over the month of November. If I was to present my web-surfing time as a percentage, I would estimate it to have been about 80 frivolous /20 constructive and that’s nothing about which to boast. Some might say I just substituted one form of escape with another. That’s probably correct if I look at the month as a whole, but if I compared November 1 escape time with November 30 escape time they would look VERY different. I wasted a lot less time on cat videos toward the end, opting instead to read articles or watch TED videos that were informative or inspiring.

There are of course things that I won’t miss about the forced self-restriction – like having to leave the room or sit off in the corner when the kids are watching TV. I eventually learned to tune it out when it was on in the same room and this came in quite handy during the football extravaganza that took place

EVERY SINGLE BLASTED WEEKEND THIS MONTH.

These are the other things I learned in no particular order:

I absolutely love the sound of silence. I loved the silence that I experienced in November and how musical the other sounds in my world – the ones that are normally obfuscated by the television – are. Take, for instance, Monday of this week…the third straight day of rain. The previous two days, I found the rain aggravating. It was like the drone on a bagpipe -- the distinctive, ever-present note that stays constant with the melody -- but with an unpleasant melody or no melody at all. No one who loves the bagpipes (as I do) wants to listen to the drone pipe without a beautiful melody to accompany it. That's what the rain was over the weekend for me -- the drone pipe to the unraveling of Christmas lights and the sounds of football. On Monday, however, it was the musical bass line which accompanied the melody of every personal thought and every other sound. A far cry from the <Rage Against Humanity Ensemble Singers>. There is also an army of squirrels that I believe is assembling an arsenal to be used against us in the near future. They are frantically scurrying across the roof and up and down the wooden posts on our back porch. This is the percussion but I'm a little afraid of it too. If you go a day or two without hearing from us, please send animal control.

Finally, I just how much I love my family -- even when I don't always like them. I love when all four of us are in our family room simply co-existing. In the past, that has generally centered around TV-watching. During the month of November, I realized that when we were all together in this room without the TV on – even if we were all doing our own thing and not talking – I was at peace. When the TV was on – and I was trying not to watch it – I felt this weird isolation because I wasn’t engaged with them and I wasn’t engaged in what they were engaged in. And there was the sound that I was working to tune out. I won’t miss that. I hope that we can have more evenings that are TV-free for all of us by choice.

So there you have it. There was actually another thing I learned about myself that I’ll save for later. Maybe. It’ll be very unpopular (inside my own home even) and so I’m going to allow it to swirl about in the cortex of my brain for a while before releasing it into the vortex of the internet.