…in our lives, our day-by-day and hour-by-hour lives. In our aboriginal existence, we were like our fellow animals, always on the watch…against hunger, predators, toxic insects or plants, unfriendly tribes. Who had time to consider meaning, fashion, loneliness? I doubt we could understand the idea of boredom.

Life today has no apparent immediacy, at least in our minds. There is nothing we need to be in the lookout for. In fact there is too often no immediate reason to be “on” at all…so we spend far too much time being “off,” time we fill with worry and regret, self’absorption, displacement activities like video games and mindless phone talk, or wondering what we’re missing or where we went wrong.

Immediacy, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour. That’s the missing element in modern life.