Friday, December 12, 2008

Dumber? Absolutely.

"Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like
a guy on a Jet Ski. "

I think that dumbness has been stalking me. And this week, I got confirmation that I have been infected with a increasing level of intellectual dullness. And evidently Google is to blame for this sorry state of affairs. I read this article this week and it has really opened my eyes to my own self-imposed attention deficit disorder. My attention span is losing its already slim shadow.

As an experiment yesterday, I sat down with a book with the goal of reading for thirty minutes. I had easy access to my Blackberry, my cell phone, and my laptop computer. I read for about five minutes and then the gravitational pull of "the need to be current" began:

"I wonder if anyone has emailed me?" "Did I check my fantasy football team?" "How far down are my stocks today?" "What did John Piper preach on last week?" "I should really watch some movie previews." "Blog. I have to blog or Aaron Mayfield can't comment."

And I struggled to concentrate for just five minutes on a book that is important to me.

Every January, our family takes a bread from media. No TV. No movies. No talk radio in the car. In the past, this has been a very painful goodbye. But this year, I find that I am looking forward to the media vacation. I feel like maybe I will listen more and learn more. Perhaps even my relationships with flesh and blood people with grow.

Maybe I will be able to read again for longer than just five minutes.

And recover some of the ground that dumbness has taken by force.

2 comments:

Amelia Antwiler said...

Hey wait ... I resemble that remark.

I was going to say something deep and meaningful -- but I distracted myself. ...

...

Amelia Antwiler said...

Oh, yeah --
don't be too hard on yourself. I bet Dumb doesn't have as much hold as you think -- see it's a morale buster mostly. It just wants you to think it has control...because it's dumb. It doesn't know much else.

What does have control is KID STUFF. My brain is so full of KID STUFF that I'm actually impressed when I complete a whole sentence. Or when something said DOESN"T remind me of a veggie tale song.

I think it's just as hard on dads to maintain a brain that is not filled with KID STUFF.

So good luck on exercising the Grown up stuff in your brain. Practice makes perfect!!

Wait...that's a kids song..
Darn I was so close!!
At least all my sentences are complete.