For a bit more than 24 hours I've been obsessed. Not with the state of suffering humanity. Not with how I can become a better person. Not with any high level moral obsession that I'd be proud of.
No, my obsession was with why our normally reliable Starlink satellite internet had stopped working. This is our only genuine broadband option out here in the wilds of rural south Salem, Oregon, where we live a whole six miles from the city limits of a state capital but have "broadband" options that people in Outer Mongolia would scoff at. (6-7 Mbps DSL over copper phone lines isn't broadband).
But that's another story. My story in this post is about the deep meaning of my obsession and how it turned out. I have to write about this, because at the moment that's all I'm able to think about.
I won't go into all of the geeky details of what I've done in the past day, which started when I came home yesterday afternoon and found that our Starlink broadband had gone offline. Usually restarting the router solves the problem.
That didn't work. I tried other suggestions on the Starlink app on my iPhone, which I could only access with our dreadfully slow cellular connection, just 1-3 Mbps at best. (Yeah, we truly do live in an internet desert of sorts.) We have a Verizon range extender, but it requires an internet connection.
I reset the router to factory settings. Didn't work. I switched the router with another Starlink router I'd installed downstairs to form a mesh network for better coverage. Didn't work. Sometimes the router would connect with the dish on our roof, but almost instantly the connection would be lost. That told me the problem likely was with the router, not the dish.
I'd put in a support request with Starlink, but aside from what looked like a canned response based on the key words in my request, I couldn't contact a real human being. Starlink is a technical marvel but its support is minimal at best, as it can take days or even weeks to get a response. Last night I decided to order a new Starlink router from Amazon. The delivery was to be between 5-10 pm today.
After spending most of last night trying everything I could think of to get our Starlink system working, and an hour or so this morning, I was really frustrated.
I'm a news junkie. Also a streaming TV junkie. I love to follow the news throughout the day on my iPhone, iPad, and laptop. In the evening I love to zone out with something non-political. Recently I started watching Game of Thrones, as I'd only seen a single episode when the series first came out. Now I'm hooked on it. So the withdrawal period yesterday and tonight was tough.
As soon as 5 pm arrived today I started opening the front door frequently to see if the new router had arrived from Amazon. At 7:30, about two hours ago, it had. Visions of Game of Thrones and internet surfing burst into my head. I ripped open the box and replaced the old router with the new one, then waited for the good news.
Sadly, there was bad news.
A red light appeared after several minutes, a sign that the router couldn't connect with the dish on our roof, which happens via a cable. I reset the router. The same thing happened. Now my frustration was really extreme. I'd been convinced that the problem was with the router, not the dish. If the dish needed to replaced, that was going to be more expensive and take more time.
Still, I started to look at how quickly I could get a new dish, either from Starlink or a local reseller. Staring at the list of things to purchase on the Starlink web site, I noticed that a DC power supply looked like the power supply of our current third generation dish, which is considerably smaller than the power supply that came with the new router I'd just bought. (Starlink used to have a separate power supply for the dish and router; now the dish gets its power from the router.)
That led me to what turned out to be a great idea: use the old power supply with the new router. When I did that, bingo! Almost an instant connection. I'd been correct that the old router was the problem. But I'd assumed that I should use the power supply that came with the new router, which apparently didn't have enough oomph (technical electrical term) to power our dish.
Well, I've gotten more geeky than I expected. I guess it is therapeutic for me to convey my deep frustration with trying to fix the Starlink problem, and then deep relief when I finally found the solution, though a lot of trial and error (mostly error, until the very end).
Here's what I take away from this experience.
For over a day my mind was consumed with how to get our broadband functional again. I did do some other things, like go grocery shopping today, but Starlink was in my thoughts, lurking in the background when it wasn't in the foreground. I knew that this wasn't a highly meditative thing for me to do, being so obsessed with the problem that I had difficulty living in the present moment. It was hard for me to sleep last night, as I kept thinking about the problem and what may be causing it.
But here's the thing.
All my worrying, all my distress, all my frustrations -- all that served to keep driving me forward to find a way out of those painful feelings. It'd be going too far to say that this was similar to the Great Doubt of Zen Buddhism. Still, I've said it, as I like the idea that I've gained something from what I went through yesterday and today.
I wish I was more of a relaxed person. Usually I sort of am. However, when something consumes me, when I feel a strong drive to do something, I can get pretty intense. Part of me wishes I wasn't this way, but another part says, "If you weren't this way, you wouldn't be who you are."
I'm a strong believer that often our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses. We want to have one without the other. I doubt that this is possible. What annoys me about myself (and annoys other people also, I'm sure) can be an asset in certain circumstances. I didn't give up on finding a solution to the Starlink problem, even though I was tempted to find someone in our area who installs Starlink systems and turn the problem over to them.
In the end, it was simply looking at a picture of a power supply on the Starlink web site that caused my mind to say, "Hey, you should try switching the power supplies." So in that sense it wasn't me that solved the problem, it was the wider world. Which sounds pleasingly Buddhist. I'll end on that note.
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