Consider...

I was thinking the other day about lots of things.

Why people will text a third party while in the company of a second party with whom they’re ostensibly holding a conversation. Why ‘tweeting’ is of interest to anyone. How the pound / number sign came to be known as a hash tag which is used to precede ludicrous non sequitirs.  

It all started with a guy who cut us off in a parking lot while texting instead of, you know, watching where he was going. So perhaps I was predisposed to feel negatively toward texting at that particular moment.

But then I calmed down and got to thinking on a somewhat different plane but still about the same basic topic. I got to ruminating about the compression of communication that arises from the availability of ‘instant’ methods of exchanging thoughts.    Of a sort.

My thinking morphed, as idle thinking is wont to do, into a consideration of the power of consideration.

Consider.

Consideration.

Considerate.

Look before you leap.

Breathe…

All terms that encourage thought before action or in the case at hand, thought before speech. It seems to me that the common thread isn’t empathy or insight or introspection, although it winds through all of these.

The common element is time. The taking of time to consider. And that’s what’s missing in so much of what passes for communication these days.