These Three Things are Baaaack!

These Three Things: Vol 53

What’s crazy is that it took Minions to make me realize just how deeply distraction gets under my skin.

Recently, I was searching for movie tickets for the kids to see a summer blockbuster that would also, ideally, provide me with a solid nap. As I scrolled through the showtimes, I noticed the fine print beneath them:

“Approximately 26 minutes of advertisements before the beginning of the feature.”

Oddly, I found the admission refreshing.

Maybe it was the transparency of it all. They basically said the quiet part out loud: "Yes, we are going to advertise to you, and to the impressionable young brains sitting beside you, for nearly half an hour before giving you what you actually came for."

Or maybe it was simply the relief of knowing I wasn’t losing my mind all those times I sat in a theater wondering, Did we buy tickets for the wrong time?

The realization did two things for me.

First, it gave me more time to reflect on the trial-size box of chocolate-covered peanuts I had just purchased for $7.75 to balance out the stale popcorn smothered in something generously described as “butter topping.”

And second, it made me wonder:

How often do we move through life accepting distraction from what we actually came for?

Now, admittedly, Minions is probably not the feature film that will awaken me from my slumber with some profound revelation about my next chapter (but it has brought me back to getting this newsletter to you!) 

But maybe the movie theater itself offers a pretty good metaphor for this thing called life.

We arrive for something.

Something that matters to us.

And then, before we know it, the previews begin. 

The advertisements roll. 

The noise gets louder. 

Something else starts competing for our attention.

And slowly, subtly, we begin accepting what the world puts in front of us without asking what it might be keeping us from.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether distraction is all around us, because it is.

The better question is whether we still remember why we came in the first place.

So, here are three things to think about as you move into your day’s feature film:

New!