Benjamin

Benjamin was running. And he was a runner. “I don’t like running,” he thought. As he turned a corner, he noticed a gnarly cedar tree off to his right. The hill sloped up to its exposed roots and knobby trunk. The branches spread out in almost every direction. As the branches extended away from the trunk they bent up and down, snaking through the air. “Those branches would make a cool walking stick,” Ben thought. “And the cedar would smell so good. Maybe that’s why I go running, because it distracts me.” Ben sort of knew that he was in the habit of running from things but he wasn’t sure if this was a bad thing or not. “Maybe I just need healing or restoration,” he reasoned. “Maybe I am doing the best thing for myself right now. In the future when I regain my strength... Oh, I said, ‘regain’. What if I never had the strength in the first place, then I am just being a wimp right? I don’t know. I’m not going to think about it right now.” Ben carried a generic MP3 player for times like this. He put the earbuds in and listened to his favorite radio show.

The show was generally a science based show that isolated specific aspects of life and presented a number of stories on the particular theme. Today Ben was learning about memory. The story told of tests that some scientists had performed that showed that the human brain can only juggle a certain amount of ideas at once. The host of the show even went so far as to say tha...

Ben crouched down to retie his shoe and the earbud fell out. He rewound the story and learned that some scientists had performed that... “Wait, too far back,” he thought. The host of the show went so far as to say that the people with fewer options in life do better because their brains can make better decisions, considering that the brain is not required to juggle as many thoughts.

“That’s it,” Ben blurted out. “I need to cut some things out of my life. What can I start with? How about my TV? Yeah... Oh but I don’t want to miss PBS. Maybe I should eat the same thing every night. Or maybe I should stop running. Yeah that is what I’ll do. I don’t even like it anyway. Why do I even run? I need to download more episodes of this show. I should get a better MP3 player to. It is hard to see with this tiny screen.”