It’s 2022: Take a Deep Breath!

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This article was originally published on January 6, 2022.

I have never been more glad to see the back end of a year than I am of ushering out 2021: good riddance and please don’t come again, I say.

But 2022 hasn’t started out too well, either. A couple of family crises, in fact, so I am taking a week off from the blog, accompanied by my new companion, an Apple 7 watch. The orthopedic surgeon who treated me after a fall a few months ago that left me with a fractured pelvis and wrist recommended it as an “alert system,” saying he urged all his patients who live alone to get one.

Mine arrived around mid-December and has been my constant companion since. I have never worn a watch, so it’s taken some getting used to, but I’ve managed to load all my medical information into it and to set up a few other things, though I have a long way to go to get it fully operational. Of course, now if I fall, it will check on me and then call 911, emergency contacts, and in general alert the universe that I may need help.

But it also talks to me. A few days ago, as I was waiting for my car to be serviced and decided to walk up a hill to pass the time, my watch suddenly said, “Hi Andrea, I see you are beginning a workout.” I was not, but pleased that it thought I was being industrious. And at 8:00 every evening, it says something like, “Hello, Andrea. It’s a good time for some mindfulness. Concentrate on your breathing. Breath in . . . and breathe out. Breathe in . . . and breathe out.” It carries on in this vein for about a minute and then says, “Well done!”

So that’s my New Year’s advice to everyone: it’s 2022—time to take a deep breath in . . . and out.

See you soon.

Image Credit: "ATTIZ Apple Watch 40mm Metal Snap Silver Limited Band Strap" by TheBetterDay, used under a CC BY-ND 2.0 license

About the Author
Andrea A. Lunsford is the former director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English. A past chair of CCCC, she has won the major publication awards in both the CCCC and MLA. For Bedford/St. Martin's, she is the author of The St. Martin's Handbook, The Everyday Writer and EasyWriter; The Presence of Others and Everything's an Argument with John Ruszkiewicz; and Everything's an Argument with Readings with John Ruszkiewicz and Keith Walters. She has never met a student she didn’t like—and she is excited about the possibilities for writers in the “literacy revolution” brought about by today’s technology. In addition to Andrea’s regular blog posts inspired by her teaching, reading, and traveling, her “Multimodal Mondays” posts offer ideas for introducing low-stakes multimodal assignments to the composition classroom.