Turning down the volume can't hurt

I have decided to do something for my health.

I am opting out of the 24-hour news/talk cycle.

When I returned home from France this weekend, I was surprised by how little it had mattered to me that I had spent two weeks without CNN analysis, talk-radio rants or the various op-ed columnists I had been following voraciously.

To be honest, most of what I used my BlackBerry to keep up with was ... baseball scores.

I did receive a couple of e-mails from my friend Mick that included news or opinion pieces designed to advance a particular point of view. I read them, but I realized later that reading them had only made me angry at what I thought was sophistry.

So I made this decision.

The times when I am at my best -- as many of you have noted in the past -- are times when I promote certain values, not when I try to advance a particular political point of view. In fact, I started this particular blog site to make the point that there are things in our lives -- friends, family and a few good laughs -- that are more important to most of us than politics.

That doesn't mean it doesn't matter who is running the country. Sometimes it matters terribly, and sometimes the people we choose for those jobs are totally unsuited to them. But all we can do is vote and speak out occasionally. The best thing we can do is touch the people around us and try one by one to create a nation of people who will behave ethically and fairly, people who will put reciprocity above self interest at least some of the time.

I don't need to know what Rush Limbaugh thinks about that, and it doesn't matter to me if Keith Olbermann agrees with me. I am not a person whose words will reach millions, but I believe I am thoughtful enough and eloquent enough that they can mean a great deal to the people I do reach.

I intend to be happy for the rest of my life, and I intend to express the reasons for that happiness through the words I write.

Is it enough?

It had better be.