NEWTON WAS RIGHT

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Dear You--

There has been a gap in my letter-writing because I’ve been recovering from a fall. Newton was right: There is such a thing as gravity. That fact was demonstrated when I tripped on one of Seattle’s famous protruding paving stones (the roots of all those gorgeous trees push them out of place) and fell face forward onto its fellows, inflicting a painful amount of damage on myself in the process. Fortunately, nothing seems to have been broken, but I was shaken and lacerated and slightly concussed, and it has taken me longer than I expected to revert to a relatively pain-free, sentient, state. Ironically, I had just left a meeting with a pastor at the time and suspect that I was still so preoccupied with some of the matters we had been discussing that I wasn’t paying adequate attention to my surroundings. I’m just glad I was walking not driving.

Ideas can be amazingly invigorating but one can become so preoccupied with them that the practicalities of life receive inadequate attention. Whatever about the impairment of one’s attention while driving from drugs, alcohol, talking on one’s cell phone, and texting, I have to wonder whether an additional offense might be in order for us cerebral types: Thinking while driving.