Spinning Faster...

It seems the momentum of the world is increasing, spinning out of control so quickly we merely blink our eyes and the day is done.  When the new one rolls around we crash in to what was not complete from the day before and in addition we find new tasks set before us, along with mountains of new information. 

How does anyone keep up with anything anymore?
There is so much at our fingertips, anytime and in almost any place. 

We do not get to escape much! 

I took a train trip for the Christmas holidays and was on the train for almost 18 hours.  I was in amazement that I could curl up in my sleeper car and doze, but whenever I wanted to I would touch the face of my phone and it would tell me just where I was along my route, time and temperature.  Nothing so cool as to be rushing along on the rails, riding on the "City Of New Orleans" and being able to look up the words to the tune by sung by Arlo Guthrie, as a catchy reminder of the history of my trail! 

Email, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube... I can look up information on any topic when my heart so desires.
Something that powerful can be rather distraction for a person like me, who use to read encyclopedia's for fun!  I had my "kiddie" set which I poured over, reading endless info on everything from aardvarks to xylophones... those were some pretty awesome books!  They taught me about caves with bats and stalagmites in Mexico and they told me who made the Statue Of  Liberty and how it got to America.  I saw the "outback" of Australia and at that moment, fell in love with koala bears;  I went to the Eiffel Tower and saw the Northern Lights...
Then I was allowed to moved on to the adult set and felt so privileged.  I still remember the deep reddish-brown leather covers that encased the books, perched on a huge shelf...  The heavy books wore gold embossed spines defining the volumes so that they could all be lined up in order.  Such an old memory now, but somehow I can still recall the smell of the pages mingled with scent of the real leather covers.  I wish that I could still hold them and feel the weight of all of that "stuff" in my hands.

I feel blessed to be alive in such an amazing place in time and technology;  but sometimes the best days seem to be of made forgetting where I left my cell phone and turning off the computer and the television.  I turn the world off for a while and pick up a book made from paper, with words pressed from ink and head out to the swing in my yard.  I take a seat while the wind blows my auburn hair across my brow and swiftly rustles the delicate pages that I hold so dear... and amazingly, the spinning seems to slow, if only for brief moment!