Lost in the Overload

This seems to happen to me fairly regularly. A lost weekend. That can be a bad thing in the Billy Wilder movie way (alcoholic fog, but that’s not what happened. We had house guests and I didn’t get time to sit at the computer and think in words.

Sometimes being lost is rather wonderful (see this popular post on “Getting Lost” from an earlier summer). There’s a bit of terror when you’re lost that inspires attention. This works literally and figuratively.

Eventually, one wants to be found or to find their own way. “i once was lost but now I’m found,” says the song “Amazing Grace.” I wrote about the art of finding your way in the wilderness, but that article did venture into the land of “finding yourself” by deliberately getting lost.

This weekend was just too busy. That’s a problem for a lot of us these days. So many distractions. I have a personality flaw in that I find it hard to leave things undone. When I look at my email, I want to clear out the inbox. I have a pile of unread magazines and I can’t seem to recycle them without at least paging through them. And then, I tend to pull out articles “to read later” that pile up in one of those wire In baskets that never gets moved to Out.

There is a pile of books I want to read next to the bed, and some on my iPad. Technology does not help at all with this overload. I use Feedly to follow other blogs and that queue always seems to have a few hundred posts to consider.

I gave up on print newspapers last year. That created the same problems as print magazines, but they came more frequently.

I didn’t take a tech holiday this weekend and I did still look at Facebook and twitter and some websites via my phone or iPad, but there just wasn’t time to sit down and be thoughtful online.

“Weekends” and even “Paradelle” have never been literal, so perhaps I’ll weekend it mid-week. Do you ever feel that weekend is a state of mind?