I’m frantically typing, though I have been silently composing this post in my head for a few hours, and that’s exactly the thing I want to write about.

You see, I’m at this conference today. Because I have poor long-distance eyesight, I normally sit close to the stage. Today I was out chatting for too long before the whole thing started, so I sat in the back, the very back, and on the outer edge. You could say that I got a bird-eye view of the whole audience.

What I witnessed over the whole day made me think really hard about myself and my attention span, or lack thereof. I saw people, smart, awesome, fun, engaging, intelligent people, with their laptops open, emailing for a few seconds, IMing, then back to a Word doc, then to a Facebook page, then on to Amazon, then looking up to look at the speaker, then back to email again. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. It was like watching my boyfriend during the season opener of football, where he’s going from channel to channel to channel, checking out all the action. I was dizzy just watching it all.

Maybe it’s always been like this. Maybe I’ve always been like this. But holy bananas, today was the first time it really hit me hard. I know the pattern all too well: I do it too. Every other second I’m on another web page, another application, another thought. I concluded long ago that I have the attention span of a cockroach on speed when I started meditating seriously. During my 10-day Vipassana meditation course, I sat for 14 hours a day, 13 hours and 59 minutes of which I thought about everything under the sun, whatever randomness popped into my head is what I hopped on to.

I’m just… in this general state of bewilderment right now, not because of what I saw other people do, but because I just saw what *I* do. I used to be extremely proud of the fact that I can do several hundred things at a time, but now, I’m not so sure. Why can’t I just sit and pay attention to one thing? I closed my laptop and put my phone on Airplane mode, just to save me from myself, and every other minute, I had to fight off the urges to revert that decision. Several times, I lost.

And when I had nothing to “do”, per se, other than focus on the speakers and what they were saying, I wanted to eat. I probably ate way more than I needed to. Why? I don’t know exactly, but possibly because of the anxiety of not doing all those other things, like checking my work email, and tweet, and write this blog, and … thinking about all the things I gotta do, should do, wanna do, etc.

How have I gotten this way? Where has my attention span gone?