Fun Reads by Rich Schram

I recently read Michael Harris’ book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. The chapters on attention and memory interested me most. Also, there was the Glossary. But you may check that out on your own. Below are some highpoints I gleaned when my attention didn’t drift to the squirrel outside the window or checking my email. *** In 1937, psychological researcher B.F. Skinner posited that humans will repeat any behavior which produces positive rewards. This theory likely explains why we check our email ten times a day, hoping for good jokes or cute kitten pictures. What won’t we do to avoid the struggle of writing! Our loss of attentiveness (and retentiveness) began long ago, as oral tradition gave way to print. Hearing and retelling edge-of-the-campfire tales evolved into reading the stories, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently. In time, most of us stopped moving our lips. Our author—Michael Harris, if you can not re...

Go back in time with me thirty-five plus years. It’s1982 and America has almost a half million military and civilian personnel stationed throughout Europe. I work as the European Advisor of an obscure DOD activity, while my headquarters and boss are stateside, 5,000 miles and seven time zones distant from my office in Heidelberg. I like my job. I keep my nose to the grindstone and give the taxpayers their money’s worth. On this particular night I am in a third floor room in the American Arms Hotel in Wiesbaden. Built in the fifties, the hotel is a five-story, mega-barracks incongruously situated amid vine-covered homes built in the previous century. In contrast to their old world opulence, my room is stark. A few landscape prints, too small for their placement, hang on the walls in lonely isolation, and the room’s furniture suffers from a military feng shui influence. Beyond the hotel, all nearby cites—Darmstadt, Mannheim, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt—are speckled...

I recently listened to a TED Radio Hour podcast entitled Slowing Down. Various guests discussed the benefit of simplifying our lives, even procrastinating, to encourage more personal creativity and satisfaction. If interested, you may find the talk by Googling Slowing Down: TED Radio Hour: NPR . The talk prompted me to think about an essay I wrote in 2014, A Minimalist Life , shortly after we moved into our condo while waiting for our house to sell. During that nine-month wait, we left almost all of our furniture in the sale-house to make it more visually appealing to potential buyers. The essay appears below. A Minimalist Life Friends look at us through pitying eyes. “Are you getting situated in the condo?” Amid sideways glances, they skirt a question they hunger to ask: “Have you sold the house yet?” When finally spoken, the inquiry triggers discomfort in our gut. Should we admit we haven’t sold and again lowered the asking price? Or should we cite our la...