Perhaps you will agree that a vacation time away permits one some different choices about the foci of one’s attention.  In our ordinary lives, the “blind impress” of accrued circumstances can be oppressive.  We feel the need to “get away” to a destination affording different scenery, perhaps time for more reading, fewer phone calls, etc.

The few days spent on the Lake Michigan shoreline granted a needed respite from the details of the surreal Trump-Putin-Bromance Summit in Helsinki.  As one might have expected that brief meeting is not over.  The hour by hour reportage of the Presidents retractions, stammering interpretations of opaque decisions,–continues.  Now our intrepid, needy leader wants another Summit, a do-over.

Who knows what reality is in-itself?  Is anything real apart from attention, without a relationship-link established by our minds via our sense experience with a phenomenon?  That question has never been answered in several millennia of philosophy.  Is reality-in-itself a coherent concept?

It was a relief, a benefit, a blessing to pay attention to the lake, to the words of family members, to the play of grandchildren, to a sunset, to the Silver Beach carousel at St Joseph.  All of these experiences were more real to me than the alternate confused events in Helsinki.

Here are some words written by Susan Sontag that are relevant to our topic.

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Literature involves.
It is the creation of human solidarity.
Social media (with its illusion of immediacy)
distances—
immures us to our own indifference.
Media with its limitless number
of unstopped stories
—offer a lesson in amorality
and detachment.
Our media-disseminated
glut of unending stories,
is a model of obtuseness,
of non-understanding,
of passive dismay,
and the consequent numbing of feeling.

To tell a story is to say:
This is the important story.
To be a moral human being
is to pay,
to be obliged to pay,
certain kinds of attention.

–Susan Sontag 1933-2004