Human beings are remarkably sensible, meaning "having the faculty of sensation." We have five senses and, unfortunately, we are overloading them. Our senses have a natural threshold that is far above the level of sensation in which we live.

Consider the simple case of the military use of decoys. If you are flying a plane and you want to keep heat-seeking missiles from hitting you, you launch a flare. The flare is so bright and hot compared to the plane in which you are flying, that the incoming missile loses "sight" of your plane and flies harmlessly toward the decoy flare, blind to everything but the flare.

Now think of your sense of vision and the night sky. If you live anywhere near a large city, or even a large shopping mall, the stars which would otherwise be visible to you disappear in the pink glow of reflected light from nearby lighting. In this case you are blinded but the light which blinds you is completely unintentional; coming from lights that are intended to light the ground, not the sky.

If you live in a city and take a vacation to the countryside, you immediately notice the quiet and realize how you have come to accommodate the constant noise of airplanes, cars, construction equipment, sirens. Suddenly you can hear birds, the wind in the trees, a child's voice from afar. Again, the noise that dulls your hearing in the city is unintentional; a byproduct of the level of activity there.

Go to a restaurant for a meal, or buy a prepared meal from the supermarket. How much of the flavor of the ingredients do you taste? You will likely get a high dose of salt and may find yourself going for the salt shaker when you eat a home-cooked meal. Your taste buds are dull from over-stimulation and a lack of salt can make food seem tasteless when it is your own threshold of taste that has been lowered. Not to mention the size of servings invites you to shovel in quantity rather than savoring quality.

I believe one of the reasons people have such intense memories from childhood is that the senses are most keen at that time; alert to everything that reaches them: a blue sky through the eye, a warm breeze on the skin, a sour cherry on the tongue.

As we move into the teenage years, sensation is the be all and end all. Music can't be too loud, you can't have a big enough TV screen, no video game is too frantic, no thrill is too extreme, no activity is sufficient by itself, and any appeal of "wow! try it!" by another is tempting.

Moving into the work world, we are expected to multi-task, and the computer sets a pace that is always beyond our ability to match. The commute to and from work is an exercise in frustration that we try to mask by turning our cars into entertainment centers, blotting out the unpleasant reality with talk radio or music or, most ironic, CD's with titles like "sounds of the rainforest."

Leisure time is often spent in front of TV, a frenzy of jerking, jumping video images and sounds that scarcely appear before they are replaced by others. Pay attention to this! Pay attention to that! Is it any wonder that people can sit in front of a screen and not see anything at all?

After all that has been presented, one would think that silence would be welcomed, that people would be eager to escape to a place to be alone with thoughts and no interruptions. But, it doesn't seem that's the case. Quite the contrary, people are disturbed by silence, boredom is dreaded, and a lack of stimulation raises anxiety. A long trip requires headphones or a DVD player. The American way of camping means bringing your home with you.

Living life at 12 miles per hour involves becoming sensitive to reality around you by disengaging from the artificial world of stimulation. The reward comes in noticing what had been missed before, in lowering the stress that is self-induced, in finding that boredom is incompatible with living in the real world, in appreciating silence for the way it opens one to the exquisitely sensual that is always present, but does not call attention to itself.

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