Being There

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Farmland, Asbury NJ (C) Judy Minot
From an article by Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic:
"Road-warrior hell: I get off a 15-hour flight from North America and turn on my BlackBerry at some Asian airport. Instead of focusing on the immediate environment and the ride into town, I am engrossed in the several dozen e-mails that piled up while I was en route, a third of which require a serious response, and one or two of which relay worrying news. As if that isn’t enough of a distraction: throughout all my journeys, because of the 12-hour time difference, each morning in Asia begins with a slew of e-mails from the East Coast, again requiring responses, again relaying crises to deal with. Wherever we are, we are all always available, and everybody knows it. The media tell us how lucky we are to live in the Information Age. I believe we have created a hell on Earth for ourselves."
The author believes that in order to truly experience someplace new, we have to stop multitasking. How about "in order to truly experience where we are?"

Do we need to relearn to do one thing at a time?

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