My Brain is Full. May I Be Excused Please?

Wow. Information, information. So much information. Blogs and Facebook and a Facebook-like collaboration site at work. Our Yahoo e-mail, my always piling up work e-mail, newspapers, links to interesting articles, stuff from Danny's school (both via e-mail and in his daily folder.) I can connect instantly to the treasure trove of "online" from work, home--my Blackberry, Su's IPhone, my new Kindle. I sometimes think there is a limit to what I can manage, and this, ladies and gentlemen is the excuse I give this week for being such a negligent blogger of late. I don't have time to create. I'm too busy digesting!

Sometimes I wonder what it must have been like to live in the not too distant past. Most people never traveled probably more than 20 miles from where they were born. Their "social network" consisted of their neighbors, church friends and folks from town. If you could read, I'm sure that books could open your mind to a whole new world of thoughts and images, but more than likely books were not that easy to come by for most.

Would this have been a boring life? If this was the only life you ever knew, how would you make an assessment that it was boring? And what is the opposite of boring anyway? Is this crazy 200 mile per hour ride every day down this "information superhighway" the anti-boring? I don't think so.

I think it's good in that our brains probably stay pretty sharp as we continually make connections with new information. But I think that the overload can also hurt. Our minds become so full of "stuff" that there is scant room for reflection and deeper thinking on well, anything.

But our world is what it is. I could do all sorts of things to slow down the onslaught, and sometimes I do. I'll opt out of some e-mails that I get constantly and never read. Or I'll request a digest from listserves rather than getting sometimes dozens of messages each day. But for the most part, I continue to slog through. Mindfully at times, but more often that not, mindlessly.

I could have written this in a private diary or journal, but no, I had to blog this deep thought. You know, so I could add some new food for thought to your world.

You're welcome. -Monica