Are you distracted? Open a book

Great description of how our increasingly busy and electronic world has us all a little scattered. I wish he spent more time on the "how" of unconnecting, but interesting nonetheless.

""What I'm struggling with," [David Ulin, in The Lost Art of Reading] writes, "is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there's something out there that merits my attention."

"I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That's getting harder to find."

That, I think, is presicely why I read, to obtain some of that "mental silence." What a precious commodity in today's world, silence. Silence to ponder, contemplate, remember. It used to be that kids *could* get bored. Now, I think when they say they're bored, what they really mean is that they're over-stimulated and over-filled with things that don't matter and they can't make sense of it. Reading is a balm for such meaninglessness. Only, it's fewer and fewer of us that can recognize the need for "mental silence."

Read it here. Found via my homeschool email group. Thanks J!