Sifting through contacts

At 2:45 a.m. / Issue 1,466

Oh, hi friends!

I got a new phone yesterday — battery life on my iPhone X cratered, yay! — and it was a smooth process, until…

Some of my contacts didn’t transfer.

Texts from my parents and close friends and Colin just had their phone numbers.

I finally realized that 230 contacts were saved directly on my old iPhone, not in the cloud. (Oh, the cloud! Does anyone understand you?!)

The solution? 

Go through the old contact list and text every contact card to my new phone, then re-save it.

Tedious? Why yes.

But as I did this mind-numbing activity at two in the morning because we are going on a trip to Banff in just a few hours, I started to think about those hundreds of people. 

Most I’d met in the last few years. Some I now text daily. Others I couldn’t recall: who was that again? Where did we meet?

There were friends of friends who came to my monthly creative summit gatherings who I haven’t talked to since the pandemic. People who lived in our building for two or three months. Old work friends and realtors and one-time songwriting collaborators.

People I really like, people I miss talking to.

And I thought: Isn’t it nice? To be reminded of all these connections?

Even if the connection isn’t strong right now, there was, at one point, a tiny thread connecting me to these other people.

As I sat there sorting and adding, I imagined all these helpful, nice, interesting people living their own lives, some now off in different states and countries, dealing with their own challenges and moonshots, dreaming deep into the night.

Imagine that.

They are only a text away.

We are more surrounded and supported than we sometimes remember. 

Threads everywhere / source

PS — leaving the computer at home for a week because I somehow have my best ideas when I’m a little more unplugged, but will be back soon. Hope our thread continues!