Adrift on the Data Stream.

October 11th was Columbus Day, the day we celebrate Christopher Columbus stumbling into America when he was really looking for China.

Hey, everyone, it's a NEW WORLD!

It was, of course, almost like discovering a new planet with new civilizations, new wealth - a world where no one had heard of Christ. So, of course, in his name the Europeans justified their plundering and murderous ways, draining the New World of its gold and infecting it with all kinds of pernicious diseases that wiped out whole tribes in a few years.

WASPS take a day off; Native Americans take to the streets to protest our glorification of someone they consider less than heroic.

This year, though, it was apparent that no one was making as big a deal of it as they used to. Companies that regularly closed down on Columbus Day no longer do and protests seemed muted. In the 21st Century Columbus Day has receded in importance.

But it is still a Federal Holiday and so we remained up at Claverack Cottage, where I worked from my home office, walked the neighborhood to soak in the changing colors of the season while chatting on my mobile. I spent a day using technology to mix pleasure and work, country air with city problems.

It is a local social scandal this week that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg wore the same pants suit more than once in one week which tells me that some people have more time on their hands than is healthy while I am confronting, as are many of those I know, that there is not enough time in the day to handle all the things flowing toward us via the digital data stream that has become our informational lifeblood.

Yes, it does allow me to face issues while staring at the Claverack Creek but it also means I have no refuge from those issues.

A business friend of mine is the President and Publisher of a well-known lifestyle magazine who lamented to me: it doesn't matter how early I get up or how late I go to bed; I STILL don't get everything done!

I understand. This week I faced a personal/professional semi-crisis. I had run out of "bandwidth."

Those of you who rode the internet boom up and down remember that phrase - it meant you had reached mental and physical saturation: there was no room in the brain or energy in the body to handle something.

I ran out of bandwidth this week. And I seem to be surrounded by people who have run out of bandwidth also.

No matter how many amazing things our phones do, there is only so much time in a day to keep up with our phones, which can now tell us where to be while we're talking, give us our e-mails, take pictures for us, receive pictures for us, play music and, if we're really wired, will tell us how to get where we're going.

I don't have one of those phones - yet. And it's putting me behind not to have one. Always an early adopter, I realize I haven't been adopting fast enough.

It is, I suspect, the absolute sign of our times. We can do so much we are actually getting more done but most people I know seem to be doing the work of more than one and are accomplishing it by over utilizing their downtime.

Faced this week with the reality that unless my schedule and everyone else's ran with military precision, my work and personal life would easily become a train wreck of timing, I decided to step back and take a deep breath.

It was time, once again, to take a deep breath, find my inner Zen, and accept that I cannot bifurcate myself into more than one person. Transporters work on Star Trek but do not exist in New York in 2004.

Personal performance expectations do not have to match the capability of our phones. However, even as I say it, I am shopping for an upgrade - it will make my life easier while I will have to learn how to tell it what to do rather than vice versa.

Breathe deeply.