Editor’s Note: Liz Peek is a financial columnist and the author of wOw’s Wall Street Weekly and SHEconomics.  

I would like to congratulate those columnists who have written anything of note in the past two weeks. I myself have not had a thought in my head. I have only just noticed this vacancy, much as one might suddenly realize that the dog is missing. Our Bichon spends her days sleeping on my slippers. She is reliably there, under my desk, at all times. If she were to vanish, it would be some time before I thought to look for her. Similarly, I am used to having thoughts constantly rattling around in my head. Heaven knows not all these notions are useful, or even particularly welcome. Still, like my Bichon, they are reliably there. Their absence didn’t immediately alarm me.
 
But, it occurred to me as I was emptying the dishwasher yesterday after breakfast – again! – that my head was as hollow as a gourd. It was a panicky feeling. How would it ever fill up again? Had I lost the urge to pontificate? What had happened to my passion for breaking news?

Thankfully, I am returning to consciousness. My brain feels tingly – like your fingers when you come in from sledding. After 15 days of frantic Christmas celebrations, I am sitting quietly on a plane bound for vacation. The din has receded, as has the welcome-but-demanding diversion of three grown children and a husband. I am suddenly thinking energetic thoughts about Somali pirates, about Bernie Madoff, about air-traffic delays. Thank God.  

Each year our minister says a Christmas prayer that includes the petition that “our hearts not be busy inns that have no room for Thee.” This request resonates. My heart, and my head for that matter, become so busy and full of the inconsequent during the holidays that very little of importance can survive.

This phenomenon is widespread, I fear. Our society increasingly offers, or indeed seeks, much mental respite. People rush frantically from work to workouts or to colonoscopies or to cocktail parties. Parents juggle homework, hockey practice, orthodontia, bathtime, library visits and dancing school, all the while praying they actually know what’s going on in their children’s heads. Weekends require D-Day-worthy logistics ensuring attendance at soccer games, kung-fu classes and birthday parties. Weekends are also spent completing tax forms, filling prescriptions, resoling shoes, deciphering insurance contracts, getting the car inspected, planning future vacations, getting trousers shortened and trying to debug the cappuccino machine.  Taking a walk requires earphones; riding in a taxi means being assaulted by advertisers jumping out from a screen three inches from your knees; waiting for a train in Grand Central Station entails watching a light and music show so compelling that people lie down on the floor to observe it. Really, on the floor!

How can anyone think anymore? How can the United States continue to innovate when everyone is so darned busy? When their senses are under constant attack? I bet there are places in the world where the pace is more conducive to creative thinking. Maybe in Bangalore, or some outpost in Australia. I haven’t been to those places, but I have been to China; people there appear even more frantic. And, nothing too significant seems to come out of the Outback, except for Nicole Kidman, of course.

Maybe instead of global warming we should be concerned about global waning – waning of the creative juices that fueled mankind’s forward motion over the millenniums. Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein – they must all have sometimes enjoyed a respite from life’s daily turmoil. Where are the great thinkers of today? I worry they are playing Nintendo, or creating a new generation of asset-backed securities. I doubt they are staring off into space solving our big problems.

On the other hand, maybe once we have all recovered from the holiday season, this concern – and my mental time out – will dissipate. At least until next year.