There is a pile of mail on my counter. There are 655 emails in my spam folder (since this time yesterday). There are 5 voicemails waiting on my office phone. There are 27 unanswered emails in my work inbox. I missed two meetings today. I attended 8 others.

Depending on which research report you reference, the average consumer will see or hear 800 to 3,000, maybe even up to 5,000 marketing messages per day.

I don’t know anyone who can process that much information. And since we are physically and mentally unable to take in and evaluate that volume of data, we develop the ability to tune out, to automatically filter the noise. At some point, we stop seeing the billboards on our daily commute, we fast forward broadcast commercials (thank you DVR!), we channel hop on radio breaks, we can even make newspaper ads disappear through tunnel vision while we read a breaking story.  Our brain develops the ability to only focus on things that might be of interest. It’s a survival tactic. It keeps us from a hard drive failure.

We do the same thing with non-marketing situations as well. Think about the chaos of a regular day. For those of you without small children in the house, take whatever chaos you have in your life and use somewhere between 800 and 5,000 as a multiplier.

Where are my keys? Where is my wallet? What time is my first meeting? Who was I supposed to meet for lunch? Don’t forget to send that email, or to pick up the dry cleaning, or to call about getting that home repair scheduled. This doesn’t even factor in all the crisis situations we might be dealing with, such as stress at work, stress about losing work, health problems, deaths in the family, etc., etc., and so on.

The point is that we live filtered lives. Twice last week during a two-day team building this truth was revealed to me. One of our speakers was talking about our ability to filter marketing messages. The second was talking about how quickly we get lost in the day at hand and lose the ability to “just be” because of multitasking on overdrive. We can’t gain perspective, because we are just trying to make our way down a mental checklist.

This is exactly why we find it so hard to hear from God. We have lost the ability to listen.  We are too busy filtering out potential opportunities to walk more closely with Him because they just don’t fit into what we’ve programmed ourselves to accomplish day in and day out. We can’t listen because we are multitasking like crazy, and crashing as many things into our schedule as we can possibly fit. We get so consumed in our daily lives that our daily walks just don’t happen. They get screened right out.

The upstairs air filter in my house is hopelessly overdue for a change. I honestly don’t know how any air is even getting through at this point. I will get to it tonight, so no worries. But that is exactly what my mental filter looks like. It’s crammed with fuzz and static. Until I change it out, I won’t have the space I need to truly listen. My filter also unintentionally tags a lot of things as noise that might actually be something I need to hear or see.  So, when I put in a clean one, I also need to put in a different kind, one that frees up space for unexpected messages and insights.

Finally, I need to take it off autopilot. Leaning on the filter to do all the work for me is what gets me in trouble in the first place. I need to slow down, stop even if that is what it takes. And listen. And look. And just be.  Maybe even catch a billboard or two.