"Point and Shoot"

How many times have you noticed a car on the road in front of you that is weaving over the line, back and forth and you thought that the driver must be under the influence of drugs or alcohol? I have seen lately more people texting on their phones or blackberries while driving and they are all over the road!!! Look, I drive a little Ford Ranger pickup truck with an extremely underpowered 4 cylinder engine, standard transmission, and no power steering. What I’m getting at is that I have to “drive” this little truck; it takes 2 hands, 2 feet and lots of planning ahead due to the low power thing. I have to concentrate on the job at hand. When the cell phone rings, or the blackberry goes off, too bad, leave a message, I’ll call when I get to my destination.

My youngest son has recently left for an extended study assignment in Europe and his car is sitting in my driveway. It’s a 2005 Chevy Impala with, you guessed it, power steering, automatic transmission and about 5 times the power of my little truck. Well heck, I paid for it, I might as well drive it. It is like night and day. I could drive this car with my knee!! It’s like you just ‘point and shoot’, no thinking or concentration required (compared to my little truck).

I can draw a correlation to life. We live in a ‘point and shoot’ world (not literally, please don’t come after me with anti-gun, or pro-gun comments). We have so much communication ability and information at our finger tips; we don’t have to worry about thinking or coordination. Most times we are overwhelmed with all the information and communications. We cannot drive to the corner convenience store without talking to someone on the phone, checking our tweets, or our facebook page. We are paying attention to everything except what it directly in front of us. If we are driving, we should drive. If we are talking to a loved one, we should talk… You get the message. We can, and do, lose track of what is important to us. I was having dinner with my wife recently at a restaurant and found myself checking email and my facebook page from my blackberry while we were at the table, and she was not happy.

Don’t get me wrong, we do live in a fast paced society and we should try our best to keep up. But each of us is different and each of our “levels of concentration” is also different. We need to prioritize our lives, concentrate on the important things and get to the lower priority things later. So, I’m going to try to keep the cell phone and blackberry in their holsters while I’m driving. Heck, with all the overcrowded highways and seemingly constant road construction, we take our lives in our own hands every time we get behind the wheel. We don’t need the further distraction of phone calls, tweets or facebook pages. So drive your high powered ‘point and shoot’ vehicle (life) like it was an old ford ranger with no power or automatic anything