This morning I woke up to my wife’s radio alarm playing a local station. The announcers were talking about the Juno’s last night and who did what, said what, wore whatever. Blah blah blah. As I listened to this, it occurred to me that the information people take in (represented in this case by what people watch and listen to) is largely circumstantial and irrelevant.
The front page of the paper this morning confirms that, at least in my neck of the woods (if you know that expression). The local paper (Hamilton Spectator) has the following FRONT PAGE articles (in order of presentation):
“Linc to get linked” – the former lieutenant-governor of Ontario gets engaged
“Sally, 21, retires from atom hockey” – a family interest story
“Clark to take on Marston” – a city councilor announces his Federal campaign
There were also allusions to yesterday’s road race, men’s shirt fashions, the weather and of course, the Junos.
Now ask yourself if any of that information is going to change anything at all about the way you live or the decisions you need to make? Realistically, the only two pieces of information that might are the weather and who’s running in the election (if you happen to be in that particular ‘neck of the woods’ – in Clark’s case, that’s Hamilton East/Stoney Creek). The family interest story might also have a distant possibility (if you read the whole thing and are touched enough to begin to volunteer or donate). The primary article? Absolutely not.
That’s not a slam against the Spectator. “News” as we define it is really anything we didn’t know before. But is dumping all this stuff into our heads really profitable (for us the readership)? Does the secular radio really contribute to my life if it’s just gossip and jokes? Is getting 20 tweets a day about the federal election (what the CBC was talking about a hour later) a good use of my mind?
Now you might think that I’m being unfairly harsh with people and industries that are really just trying to make a living. I don’t mean to trash them at all. I do think, however, that with a limited amount of hours in the day, and with less than 25 thousand days in a lifetime, we need to be more careful what we fill our heads with.
In the end, every decision we make carries us toward our final end. You’ll make thousands of decisions every day, and every single one of them is made out of your frame of reference. It seems logical that if you expand your frame of reference (more information) you’ll make better decisions. But that’s only true if the frame of reference has useful stuff in it. If you apply the context of time, you realize that we simply can’t know even a fraction of what’s coming at us. So you will (by conscious choice) apply a filter – willfully applying a bottleneck to the information flow. If by nothing else, then by simply realizing you are running out of time (ie, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep now!’).
The question then that ought to burden each of us is, ‘on what basis do I create my filter’? And again, you’ll make a conscious choice toward your final destination. Be careful what you read, be careful what you listen to! And once wise choices are made, you can exercise wise time management to choke back all the chaff, freeing yourself to enjoy life without worrying that you’re missing something.
Ps 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Amen.
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