Waiting for the water to heat so I can finish the washing-up this morning, I just came across Nicholas Bate’s ‘The Rules of Life‘ e-book on Eclecticity.  (I also just read John Althouse Cohen’s ’15 rules of blogging for myself’, where he cautions fellow bloggers to write thoughtfully.)

Maxims and advice abound on the vast internet and selectivity is the name of the game.  To indulge myself in the metaphor of my title: there are lots of flashes going off, attracting our attention, but it’s up to us to focus and record the things that can be classed as either ‘important’, ‘investing’, or ‘interesting’.

Something I noticed about ‘The Rules of Life’ is that Bate encourages his readers to take a moment each day to mull over the truths he presents so they begin to sink in.  As much as we want to behave like machines and file things away, bookmark them, post links to them, we don’t work that way and my nice metaphor doesn’t really transfer to a human being’s brain.  We need to read, to re-read, to question, to think, to sleep on it, to talk about it.  Machines we most certainly are not.