Life is full of distractions, and you never know when you are going to be distracted just when you should be paying attention to what you are doing. Sometimes the consequences can be minor, and sometimes they can be tragic.

There are many things competing for our attention these days. We can be distracted by a sound, an event or even our thoughts, but today’s No. 1 distraction seems to be little electronic devices that we carry around on the pretext of staying in touch with what’s going on when what they really do is distract us from the world around us.

We are plugged into our own personal concert or looking at our calendar to see where we’re going next. Cell phones offer both a visual and an auditory distraction that we find hard to resist. Not only can we talk to someone on the phone but also we can send a text message, check our e-mail or see what the weather is in Cincinnati.

And all the while we are paying little, if any, attention to where we’re walking or how we’re driving.

Sometimes, the results can be mildly humorous, as in the case of Valerie Jarrett, an aide to Sen. Barack Obama, who recently fell off a curb in Chicago while her thumbs were flying across her BlackBerry keyboard. “I didn’t see the sidewalk and I twisted my ankle,” she said. “It was a nice wake-up call for me to be a lot more careful in the future because I clearly wasn’t paying attention as I should have.”

Is anybody listening?

On a more somber note, the Kansas Highway Patrol announced this week that the driver who struck and killed a bicyclist in June near Eudora had been distracted by a cell phone and other electronic devices in his car when the collision occurred. The road where the bicyclist was struck was straight and level, the report indicated, and although there were scattered showers in the area, there were no problems with visibility.

We don’t know if the driver was dialing or talking or reading or texting, but he apparently wasn’t giving his driving the attention it deserved.

That, unfortunately, isn’t an uncommon circumstance these days. More often than not, when a driver, bicyclist or pedestrian is seen acting in a lackadaisical or inattentive manner, some kind of electronic device is involved.

We rationalize our behavior by saying “I only glanced down for a few seconds” or “I wouldn’t have taken that call, but it might have been important.” Maybe so, but in those few seconds something much more important might be happening that is even more worthy of your attention.

As we said, life is full of distractions, many of which you can do nothing about. It’s only smart to eliminate as many distractions as you can.