I am easily distracted. Well, except when I ride. I tend to be pretty focused when I ride. However, the rest of the time….SQUIRREL!

I think this may be the period in history when we are all culturally most distracted. There is just so much demand on our attention. As such, I began thinking about whether we take time any more to really think about life. To search the deeper meaning.

I came to the conclusion; we don’t.

I look around and we are most often buried in our phones. Which, I will not harp on as I have written too many words on this already.

However, our present distraction keeps us from taking any time for the interior life.

What, you may ask, is the interior life.

Well, for the most part, it comes from what most consider their prayer life. But if you are not a religious you may just consider it meditation, day dreaming, letting the mind wander, asking yourself the probing questions in life.

No, we are far to distracted by the immediate to consider the deeper meaning of the important.

And this is where life has lead us. I blame email the most. Well, and TV. Netflicks. Face Book, Twitter. Instagram…the list goes on.

You notice I did not say, our family, our friends, the things that really matter.

Nope, we have allowed our electronic lives to supersede our actual lives.

I am continually concerned about my email. I am an email’aholic. I must read and typically respond. And the worst part is that as of this writing I have six email addresses. SIX!

If I do not check and deal with my email on a very regular basis (read multiple times per day, if not continually when I am working) I quickly get hundreds of emails behind. And I hate getting behind on email. I clear my inbox every day, all of them.

I was talking to someone the other day and notice he had 1753 emails in his inbox. I gaped. Literally, it made me nervous and I could not even focus on our conversation seeing that. I asked him how he dealt with that fact. He seemed shocked I asked. “Oh that, man I will never get to 90% of my that mess,. Why?”

I did not know what to say. But it answered a question for me. This is why so much of my email goes unanswered. Especially from him!

We have traded working in the literal fields for having to clear the weeds of our information fields (no pun intended for my IT geek friends).

And our fields are overgrown and choking the actual crop to death!

So what do we do?

Well for one, I began cleaning this up in my personal life by unsubscribing to everything that was not absolutely critical. Then separating my email into accounts, not boxes, accounts. Of the six email accounts I have I began relegating specific ones for specific things in my life; business, personal, vocational, e-commerce. I had to, having it all come to one box was just not working.

I am also trying to break myself from habitually checking email (or Facebook, Twitter, etc…). I am spending more time writing and thinking, time with family and friends. And on that note, actually have time for friends. I realized that while I spend time with my family, I spend far to little time with friends.

I set time aside for just sitting and thinking. Making myself contemplate my life and, yes, pray for help with all of this.

I am tired of being continually distracted.

I want my interior life back.

Before I am gone, I want to do more than respond to email!