I’m late to the party on this, but Pico Iyer’s essay in the New York Times on Quiet is fantastic. Here’s a particularly thought provoking quote:

Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

The Web is a Class VI river rapid that is so much fun and engaging of the senses that we can’t help but want to go for a ride. At times, I worry sometimes that I get so caught up in the current that the world around me seems ordinary by comparison. I have to work hard at intentionally quieting myself. But the pull of a portable “everything device” that can give me any corner of the world at anytime makes that task increasingly difficult.