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Blogs by J P Lane
Re: The Time Thief 2/17/2011 3:15:13 PM
A few years ago I had a crazy notion. The reason everyone was feeling like there weren’t enough hours in the day to get through everything was because there really weren’t enough hours in the day. Our days had shrunk and the most logical explanation was the world was spinning faster. But the authorities were keeping mum about this because they didn’t want to create panic.
At the time this bizarre thought entered my head, I read an article that said each century the solar year gets half a second shorter. But I hadn’t lived long enough for that calculation to make a scrap of difference in my life, and it didn’t explain why I felt there weren’t enough hours in the day to do everything on my list. My friends were feeling the same stress. Their immediate explanation for the time shrinkage phenomenon was it’s natural to slow down as you get older. But I was as busy as I’d ever been, just not getting through as much.
Yesterday, I had an ah-ha moment while talking to my doctor’s wife. She accidentally deleted an e-mail invitation to a New Year’s Eve party thinking it was another forward. There and then the penny dropped. E-mails are the culprit that has been stealing my time. I’m inundated by e-mails. They are the cause of my underlying sense of failure. If you can’t accomplish a task as simple as reading your e-mails, how much of a handle do you have on your life? But who can read hundreds of e-mails a week? The alternative is to delete all those forwards without opening them. But such action often leads to feelings of guilt – what kind of friend am I that I haven’t even bothered to read their e-mail? No matter which way you cut it, an over abundance of e-mails can be a stress factor.
We all like to keep in touch, but what ever happened to “How are you?” Are we keeping in touch when we forward the Money Angel for the tenth time, or are we passing the buck? How many times has this digitally created being done the e-mail rounds, wearing something new for each annoying appearance? Countless warnings are issued about forwards designed to collect e-mail lists for spam and yet we continue to ignore them. I wish my family and friends all the prosperity in the world, but I’ve never forwarded the Money Angel and never will. As to those forwards that challenge your faith (if you believe in God forward this to 10 people) or the ones that threaten misfortune if you dare to delete, I dump those in the trash and take my chances. God knows my heart, and maybe I’ll score some extra points by not stealing precious time from those on my e-mail list.
