Two Minutes of Being Unavailable

There is a kind of noise that makes no sound at all, and I want to name it, because most people who carry it have never called it noise.

It is being reachable.

Not busy, and not interrupted. Reachable, which is a different state and runs whether or not anybody actually reaches you. It is the low, constant readiness of a person who could be needed at any moment and knows it, and that readiness costs something every hour whether or not the phone goes.

Ask yourself when you were last genuinely out of reach for two consecutive minutes. Not asleep. Awake, and unreachable, and nobody in the world able to get to you.

Most people cannot remember. Some have to go back to childhood.

And here is what makes it so hard to see. There is no moment when this arrived. Nobody handed you a document. The expectation that a message gets answered inside a few minutes assembled itself out of ordinary decent behavior over about fifteen years, and now it feels like a duty rather than a habit.

Waiting, which is a direction

Psalm 62 opens with a line that is usually read as a promise and is actually a posture.

Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation. (Psalm 62:1)

There is a translator's note worth having here. The Hebrew behind waiteth carries the sense of silence, of a soul that has gone quiet toward God.

That is a direction rather than a volume. It is not describing a person in a silent place. It is describing a person who has stopped putting out and has begun to be still toward one particular direction.

And the reason that matters for a permanently reachable life is that a reachable person is never silent in that sense. Some part of them is always facing outward, listening for the thing that might come. Not anxiously. Just facing.

You have been facing outward for years, and the facing was never something you agreed to. Psalm 62:1 describes a soul gone quiet toward God rather than a body placed in a quiet room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can turn a person's attention around without requiring them to go anywhere.

And the second half of the verse is the argument for it. From him cometh my salvation.

The reason the psalmist can stop facing outward is that the thing he actually needs is not going to arrive from out there. That is worth sitting with for a person who has been available for fifteen years, because availability is, underneath, a belief about where necessary things come from.

You are not the source anybody is actually waiting on, and the salvation was never coming from your direction. Psalm 62:1 puts what a person needs as coming from God rather than from their own readiness. The Spirit of God is the one who can lift the weight of being the one who must be there.

Two minutes, and tell nobody

So here is the practice, and one detail in it matters more than the rest.

Be unreachable for two minutes. And tell nobody it is happening.

The telling is what most people reach for, because it feels considerate. I am going to be off for a bit. And it undoes the whole thing, because now there is an arrangement, and an arrangement is a form of being reachable. It simply moves the availability into the future and puts a note on it.

Two minutes needs no announcement. Nothing can go wrong in two minutes that could not go wrong during a shower, and nobody thinks twice about a shower.

Leave the phone in another room. Go outside, or stand by a window, or sit in the car on the drive. Two minutes.

You are permitted to be out of reach without arranging it first, and the arranging was always the thing that undid it. Psalm 62:1 has a soul go quiet toward God with no announcement made to anybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in two minutes nobody has been told about.

And one plain thing, said once and then on we go. If what is heavy is not the availability but something in your own head, and if some part of you has been thinking about not being here, tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988, at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, or one person whose number you know by heart. That is wisdom and God is entirely in it.

What comes up in the two minutes

I want to prepare you for something, because it surprises people and can end the practice on the first attempt.

What comes up is usually not peace. It is a small pulse of something that feels like risk.

That is not a spiritual problem. It is what happens to a nervous system that has been on standby for fifteen years when the standby is switched off for the first time. It passes, generally by about ninety seconds, and it is not a sign that anything is wrong.

I would rather tell you that in advance than have you conclude, at second forty, that being unreachable does not suit you.

He only is my rock and my salvation; he is my defence; I shall not be greatly moved. (Psalm 62:2)

Not greatly moved. The psalm does not claim a person will feel nothing at all. It claims a floor under them.

You are standing on something that does not require your readiness, and it was under you the whole fifteen years. Psalm 62:2 promises a person is not greatly moved rather than promising they feel nothing. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in ninety seconds of something that feels like risk and is not.