My wife gives me a 'gentle hard time' when we're taking a long weekend and get out to a beautiful anchorage and I immediately check the latest news, politics, stock chats. Being plugged in is a bit of an addiction these days.

I remember crossing the Pacific back in the early 80s. Back then you wrote letters that took a couple weeks to get delivered home, and looked forward to getting a reply in a few months if you were lucky enough to have guessed a good time frame and place for folks to mail letters to you. I listened to Armed Forces Radio from time to time to keep up with major world happenings. There was always a crisis going on - whether a revolution in a strategic country, a confrontation between Reagan and Gorbachev, some other potential catastrophe gripping the world's attention. After a few weeks I would turn on the radio to learn how things were going with the latest crisis, had things taken a turn for the worse. Invariably there was no mention whatsoever, not a peep - it had simply resolved itself or disappeared - but there sure was a new crisis to take it's place, gripping the world's attention. Being so far removed from it all taught me how the news jumps from crisis to crisis, and how easy it is to be consumed by it when you follow it day by day.

By all means, get unplugged from time to time, and for longer stretches when you can.

Max