I don’t know about you but have you ever thought about how much TV you watch, what you are watching and why? We recently started to consider these questions. We discovered that we had the TV on a lot. We weren’t always watching it but rather just had it on. Sometimes it was for background noise, other times we would be watching it, go outside and leave it on while we were outside.
Now let’s consider the questions what and why. What we were watching...kid shows, movies, cooking shows, car shows. Very few of these offer any value to our lives if we really sit down and consider it. When you look at what is most important in our lives, TV adds nothing to help foster what we consider the important things in our life...God and family. Which brings us to the why, habit. I think turning on the TV was a habit we had learned from along time ago. Get home from work and you turn the TV on, etc. Habits are a huge part of our lives (more on this in an upcoming post) and if we aren’t fostering good habits then bad ones are setting up shop in our lives.
So we have decided to reevaluate our lives to make sure what we are doing is bringing us closer to God and family. If it does not then, we need to reduce or remove. This is not going to be a fun or easy process. It means we are going to have to take a hard look at our lives and change some things. We all know change for the most part is not easy. We like our routines and habits because it does not require us to think, we just do, which is a great when you are focused on the right things. We have to refocus and retrain our habits.
Okay maybe saying a summer with no TV is not quite accurate. We will call it “A Summer with almost no TV”. We will still watch a few select shows in the evening, on occasion. We finished the book, The Secret Garden recently and rented to movie to compare the two. We will still do these fun things from time to time but we will NOT be cutting the TV for habits sake.
Results:
We have been trying this for almost 10 days. There were some complaints at first but now for the most part it is not a big deal. We spend more time outside and learning new things. We also get to spend more quality time together as a family. We are hopeful to continue this past the summer and maybe just maybe work towards no TV. As our experiment continues, we will come back with another update.
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