A bit of misfortune struck our house recently. I was working in my home office when I heard a popping noise come from the family room where Lisa was watching television, followed by the words, “Something’s wrong with the television. The screen is blank, and nothing is happening when I hit the power button.” In other words, I’d received my cue to come take a look.

My initial reaction was it’s time for a new television. We really like the current set, but it is six years old. A new television would be a nice upgrade, but I wasn’t particularly excited about spending a thousand dollars or more around the holidays for a replacement.

I was just about ready to trash the old television and pull the trigger on a new one when a fond memory of me, my dad, and a washing machine hit me.

I recently spent a day off the internet. It wasn’t part of some digital detox or planned in any way. An electrical outage in the area broke some equipment that took longer than expected to repair.

From start to finish, I was off the grid for about 30 hours. After getting over the initial shock of being unable to check email every 5 minutes, I did some reflection around my dependency on the internet and my online habits.

Here’s what I learned.

Too many choices. Is there such a thing?

The short answer is yes, and how we deal with it matters. A lot.

I may not address the issue of too many choices as eloquently as Seth Godin recently did. As one of my favorite bloggers, he has a gift for using very few words to boil things down to their essence. However, I can’t resist riffing off his post. Making choices is one of my fundamental beliefs to living a good life. With his post, Seth brought up a great point of how to deal with the dilemma of too many choices.

Seth Godin’s blog is one of my favorite daily reads. Every day he offers up pearls of wisdom around marketing, business, and personal help. The posts are brief, yet powerful and inspirational. I found one of his recent posts about “The wisdom of the water tower” to be especially interesting. While the metaphor can be applied to many areas, I found it particularly applicable to caring for one’s self.

What could a water tower possibly teach us about caring for our self? Well, as it turns out, it can teach us a lot.

How many times have you went out to eat at a new restaurant, and the conversation has went something like this:

“The food is good, but it’s not as good as the food at <insert favorite restaurant name(s) here>”

“I love the ambiance here. It’s the best I’ve ever experienced at a restaurant.”

“The drink selection isn’t as good as the one they have across town.”

In my case, it happens a lot. I enjoy discovering great restaurants, so my natural inclination is to invoke comparisons with other places I like and experiences I’ve had. While comparisons are not all bad and necessary to make better decisions in the future, they do have a downside.

I experienced a circle of life moment earlier this summer when Brad and Courtney relocated to Michigan. It stirred up memories of when I left my parents’ home to move to Southern California. At the time, I figured it was a temporary move. I thought I would spend a few years on the west coast and then move back closer to Pennsylvania.

Well, I’ve been in Southern California for over 30 years. So unless your definition of temporary is different than mine, I’d say my move was permanent. And while they will always be welcomed back, something tells me Brad’s relocation will be permanent, too.