Blog 3895 – 07.22.2026

Distracted

One of my favorite authors when I was a young man was C.S. Lewis. He was a famous Christian apologist of the last century. He died on my thirteenth birthday, November 22, 1963. President John F. Kennedy and author Aldos Huxley also died that day. President Kennedy was a Roman Catholic but really more of a pragmatist and Huxley was an atheist. Someone wrote a book in the nineteen seventies speculating about an after life conversation involving those three famous men with radically different points of you.

Of the three views, I suppose the one that makes the most sense to me as I begin the last quarter of this life on my way to one hundred, if we indeed as the song says “Have only got one hundred years to live.”, is that of the pragmatist.

Lewis and Huxley were born in the late 19th Century and Kennedy in the early 20th Century. I, as sort of the fourth monkey, was born in the middle of the 20th Century. JFK was the first American President born in the 20th Century.And I if I get 100 years will make it mid way through the 21st Century.

It is an oversimplification to call any man or woman one thing, like author, apologist, atheist, or pragmatist for we are, every one of us, often distracted from even our strongest positions or beliefs.

One of the most pragmatic positions that Lewis ever took in his writings was his insistence that the telephone was a great distraction and that he felt that we were like genies in bottles forced to stop whatever we were doing to answer that annoying ring, usually an unsolicited sales call or a wrong number. I wonder what Lewis would think of our current slavery to the tiny screen that we hold in our hands, our phones, how our real lives have more and more difficult time distracting us from the phone’s hypnotic siren call.

Since our phones got smart we seem to have gotten less so and we seem harder to distract from the shiny object in our hands. I wonder how much of our one hundred years we will spend distracted by our phones instead of the other way around as Lewis was by his.

Your friend and fellow traveler through time and space,

David James White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sk-ef416oFcIyBk9P3ZyAPa0oUjddrFp/view?usp=drivesdk

100 Years