Distracted Living

The New Yorker, 1/16/2016

The curse of our age is the lack of attention we give to this breathing moment. We are unable to aim our thoughts at a single topic and see it through. I know this from experience. How often have I set out on one path, with every intention of following through to the end, only to be distracted by some shiny object requiring my immediate attention. There is too much glitter in this world. We know what to blame, but are we capable of identifying who to blame? Every minute there is something new to take us away from what might have satisfied our minds, but we would rather open our phones and click on the latest tweet and go into the media hole. Click, click, click is really the tick, tick, tick of our lives getting away from us. How many hours have I spent searching for distractions when I should have been pursuing something of value.

Is our drive to click another part of our national addiction to everything easy? We eat junk food. We watch junk TV. We have lowly interests: celebrity, sports, money, etc. We allow others to steal our time, the one precious thing we can't get more of, but are upset if we lose $20. If we thought of our time as something real, would we treat it with such little care? Don't be like the man that had a million dollars and is now down to his last $100. How closely he watches every dime. We should be the same with our time. When we were young, our days never seemed to end and we were happy to waste them. But now, with the end getting nearer, we find the days becoming more precious like that last $100 bill. Find a way to spend time well, and you will have accomplished much.