Overloaded

I looked around the classroom. The teacher was still talking about the Millenium Goals to beat poverty. The students were scratching away on their note pads, or as it happens more often, compulsively checking their Facebook page on their Macbooks. I felt very, very far away.

That is the thing with so-called new technologies. You always want to be somewhere else, on another Firefox tab, texting someone new, escaping into another playlist.

This Saturday, I was running with the cross country team. We wanted to run 10 miles. So we did. We had to keep together. I realized how seldom I spend hours with people. Meetings between two work meetings, hurried lunches, drinks. Those take an hour. Running for miles means talking or listening to other people, no escape, unless you decide to run a bit faster and make everyone breathless.

Running means you have to focus. On the pain in your legs, the slight wheezing I get from asthma, so you never overreach yourself. This is also something I don't do enough of: the quiet assessment of my body's thresholds.

My mother sometimes talks about cancer being an opportunity to slow down and block out "the noise". This would be people ringing at home all the time. Yes, I am the human answering machine.

Have you noticed people always say "the noise"?

What's your noise?