Now, Where Was I?

Interruptions.  Distractions.  Detours.  Such things can break our focus, derail our plans, or take us off course.  Sometimes it is easy to pick up where we were, resume our train of thought, conversation, or task, but often a disruption sends us in a new and different direction.  Even a scheduled meeting can mean that we don’t get back to where we had been or what we had been doing before heading off to that appointment.  The brief hiatus this Monday Muser announced in September became longer because it took a while to regain my weekly writing rhythm.

The number of and variety of interruptions possible in our world today seems to be increasing.  Our phones, which no longer keep us rooted in one place, now notify us that we have email.  Even as we watch one news story a ticker tape runs across the bottom of the TV screen streaming with other headlines.  Ads pop up, robocalls sell and tell.  The outside world can bombard us and interrupt us 24/7.  I found a statistic reporting that the average worker experiences 50 interruptions a day and that seventy percent of them have nothing to do with work.

One result of this new norm of expected and accepted interruptions is the fact that we have become an immediate people.  We seek immediate gratification, answers or solutions, and think that we must act right away.  This is reinforced by movies that resolve complex issues in two hours and by the ‘call now to receive a bonus’ commercials that interrupt the plot.  In the middle of dinner we can ‘Google’ to look up the exact year that Tootsie Roll was introduced to prove our case and resolve a conflict.

Another by-product is that we are constantly in-touch and in-the-know both in our own circle and, through round-the-clock news coverage, with the world at large.  Those not by a computer or TV all day or who leave their cell phone turned off, may not realize how addictive a beep, vibration, or ‘this just in’ message can be.

Because of this immediacy norm, we have a generation that hasn’t experienced busy signals or a boss’s closed door.  It is easy for any of us to become our 3-year old selves, unable to understand the concept of ‘wait.’  Just monitor your frustration level the next time it takes longer for a website to open up.

Still one more result of our instant society is that we invent ways around the interruptions.  Record a show and fast forward to the end, use In-Demand and avoid commercials all together.  Missed calls go to voicemail.  We also find ways to reframe the inevitable intrusions into routine conveniences such as the ability to answer the phone with the touch of a button on the steering wheel. 

I rant about this today because tomorrow we finally bring to an end what has seemed to me a very long intermission.  I have not experienced this election cycle as a process that we are privileged to share.  Rather it has been a lengthy disturbance that has not energized, and from what I hear when I do tune in, I am not alone in this reaction. 

We all know that elections matter, that we should be engaged and informed, but it has become awfully hard to balance our immediate lives to the yearlong campaigning.  Whatever side of the aisle calls to our values and priorities, let us all exercise our right to vote, deal with the results, quickly adjust to whatever unfolds, and together find a path back from the detour of partisanship.   

Of course, the larger problem with all of this is summarized by C.S. Lewis when he wrote, “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.”

I hate to interrupt a good rant, but, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go muse about that.