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I often find myself guilty of allowing the schedule of "modern life" to dictate the amount of time I feel I have to spend on things.
Everything in God's creation unfolds precisely as it needs to, in its own time. It is too often I that feel like things are not moving "fast enough".
This post pairs well with your last post. It's a worthy theme, actually. I think the modern lifestyle constantly pushes toward a increasingly hectic pace, one that humans weren't designed for. When I sit on my milking stool or hang up the laundry, I focus on listening to nature around me. I am constantly amazed how nothing in nature is in a hurry. That no bird, insect, or critter is in a hurry. Each living creature continues at a calm pace, simply doing what they were created to do.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, one of the great advantages of New Home 2.0 is that we have such beautiful blooms here of all kinds of trees and flowers. I could not make one of these, yet they are here in their thousands, unfolding without any intervention at all but creating carpets and towers of beauty.
DeleteBees are another good one to watch. Bees never hurry, they just move from bloom to bloom about their business.
Only we, it seems, insist on ramping up our speed for purposes which must mystify all of God's creation.
Don't wait until you're retired to look up the meaning of the word "relax" TB.....also the word "guilt" as well TB.........:)
ReplyDeleteNylon12 - I chuckled at this, but thank you for the good reminder. I suspect that is a part of the being "set aside in the tool box", as ERJ posted some days ago.
DeleteWith the health issues, slow is my only speed. But work quality has improved. Since I can only do it once, I take my time and do it right. I believe that's the mindset to have. Still doing all I can. Still stretching for a goal. Mindful of the limits. When I was younger I rushed thru a lot and rework was a given.
ReplyDeleteSTxAR - There is a saying in my industry (probably in yours as well) that there is never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it again to make it right. We have come to confuse speed of execution with accomplishment.
DeleteI, too, rushed much more when I was younger. Now I appear to try to cram more into the time I have, thus showing I have apparently learned very little.
Modernity is full of such trappings; the counterfeit products of Progress. Productivity reaching to the stars and yet we have never made so much worth so little.
ReplyDeleteAll money, no wealth. Imagine then how our hearts must ache for we are gifted the ability to discern this difference but cursed by our fallen world ever entrapping us in the false pursuits.
All is forward and so gravity pulls us evermore toward tomorrow at the expense of today. Much of the “business” we feel is just that: a feeling.
Our temporal senses are drawn into this other place that is not here and now. This we feel that time is always running away from us instead of underfoot.
The entire construct of our lives in work and the social commons are of an architecture that ignores the physics of truth and instead ever stretches into that void.
Innately we are attuned this and have many systems that warn us when we build out over such false constructs.
Everyone is so busy! There is simply not enough time. Which is the power of half truths. Time here indeed is finite. But the more we fixate on that the more we impair our ability to grow ourselves into the infinite that is our covenant.
On some simple level for me it is “anxiety”. I just can’t work enough and rest enough and serve enough and also just “be”. Something must give. I try, not always so well, to internalize the truth that the gift has already been given. Time is on our side.
But I will say that the purposeful slowness of my life I have designed does indeed further bifurcate my life from those of my friends and others who are wholly invested in the great Progress.
Anon - There have been reams written on "Progress" and how good it is. The reality is that much of that writing focuses uncritically on progress and does not differentiate between that which is truly beneficial and that which, in the end, makes things worse.
DeleteYour image of picking up speed as progress sweeps us along is a good one. We start off at a slow pace, maybe trying to keep up with a jog step or two. Before we know it we are starting a slow jog and our speed continues to increase as we seek to keep up until we reach a point that we seem to be in a full-on sprint - until we suddenly smack into the wall that awaits all of us, be it a health issue or death or the incident that completely changes our life.
You capture the idea of "anxiety" well - for me, it is the feeling that no matter how much I do, I am never really doing as much as I should in any aspect of my life. Part of this has to be me learning to simply say "no" to some things; part of that is me paying attention to that Still Small Voice that has very clearly spelled out what I should be doing.
"Purposeful slowness". I like that term. I have tried to build that into my own life as well, things as varied as writing in an ink pen in my journal instead of typing into a computer (as I type into a computer; Oh, the irony) or practicing an instrument by hand or even moving by the speed of foot.
Odd that what for those of years was taken for granted as the speed of life is now one that must be made by choice.
Maybe one of the GenX experiences is that angst of being part of - but not a big enough part of, the massive social and technological shift into the nothingness of a digitized and financialized world. The bullet train to nowhere.
DeleteYou see, if the system doesn’t cultivate that false sense of urgency people might just notice that everything they are working so hard to produce is to keep that train going faster and not for the landscape upon which it bullets past. It desires to escape. We desire to belong.
I had a real hard time in corporate life finding meaning in that other plane of existence.
Social “science” used to study the impact and implications of tech innovations before it was converged fully and all presumed benevolent.
Even twenty years ago “they” knew that merely placing a smart phone on a table as two people ate lowered human bonding potential. Empathy, compassion, various metrics of emotional engagement declined merely by its presence. Not even its use.
Now look around the restaurant.
Same goes with mothers and infants. And infants with those same phones as proxy mothers. Are there correlations between holding babies and creating eye contact and unknown stimuli that when replaced by a phone or nothing at all as mom is scrolling nearby and that of things like autism? We will never know. Too many sacred cows.
The thing with our bullet train, which is nothing new on its own, is that there are aspects of that speed for which we are ill equipped.
The integration of progress is not just given as improvement to our lives but also the speed at which we uptake. “Viral”.
What might be lost in this techno-shorthand of life, ever shrinking in its meaning and bond to our story of who we are as a people?
I don’t know the solution but like I said we are given all we need like every other generation and when we are honest we know what is Good and so our mantle is that of stewardship of that landscape while our livelihoods increasingly become tied to the digital guts of that train.
Purposeful. Ownership.Courage. The old times had their own challenges too but I think all times favor those things that are most proximate.
A long time ago I was involved with the slow food movement. Now I just call it ‘having dinner with my wife’. Slow compared to what? Well now we know all too well. In that slowness there is a whole other world that starts long before I sit down with my bride to eat. I choose to toil in that world.
There are a lot of ways in which we can build a parallel set of tracks with some switching stations. We must allocate some time to slow down and think about those things if we desire to be good stewards and shepherds.
I left the corporate world, which I sorta recommend but not really.
It’s a deeply personal thing to reject the material benefits of the bullet train system. My family has “suffered” greatly for the financial burdens of hopping off the train.
Yet my choice is also a reflection of the peak luxury of our time. I’d say abundance but in reality we are eating the seed corn of our grandkids and so I hesitate to count that which is not ours.
Something that is essential to remember. My own grandparents having most of their days accounted for in order to procure minimum calories to survive.
Progress ain’t all bad. We just have to keep our wits about what is moral, amoral, and immoral and take ownership of all of our choices.
My dear brother “my employer forced me to take the jab” included. A lot of the most important choices get pulled into that cattle car by the gravity of that promise of tomorrow.
I wonder if a great deal of what you are pondering on is related to the fact that so much of modern life involves us not being present in our own circumstances and situations.
DeleteFor example, take social media. It is almost completely about other people, other lives, other situations. We live vicariously through them. They become more "real" to us than our own rather ordinary, dull lives - not because our lives are at all dull, but because they pale in excitement and desirability to what we see on the screen. It is like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous", except appearing every moment instead of once a week.
For me, at least, getting off the corporate express is not something that works at the moment. It is okay, of course - my job is hardly unbearable to the point where leaving is the only options and I have a great many friendships at work that I would be loathe to leave. But there is a real sense that - sooner or later - that springing from the train moment will come, whether by choice or forced ejection. I am trying to do now what I can to prepare for the later.
Time marches onward
ReplyDeleteshifting colors with seasons,
dragging me behind.
Being a bit younger than present company, I don't quite feel this problem as acutely or as constantly. But it has struck on occasion, and I dread that time when I oscillate between "All this needs doing!" and "Wherever did the time go?".
I've yet to come to grips with the knowledge that my own life is but a fleeting moment in time, perhaps. Whether such wisdom provides comfort is a matter of perspective.
Dragging me behind
DeleteI see the green leaves budding
outside my window.
P_P - You are perceptive to see that while this is not something that has appeared now, it is coming for you as it came for all of us.
Sometimes I suspect "coming to grips" with it is simply acknowledging that this is the way it has ever been. That is not to say we cannot have impact that can last far beyond our own lives (or indeed, into eternity). Perhaps the best way to think of them is as Moses wrote in Psalm 90, that we might know of the number of our days so that we can use them well.
“Achievement Society” demands never ending self optimization.
ReplyDeleteIt can be rather exhausting.
For myself, this exhaustion is not a simple maintenance issue- it’s more a question of what do I really want here at a soul level?
Some things are remarkably consistent, human nature being one of these things.
The human condition often seems to be about contradictions. Many of which don’t need solving, often acceptance is enough.
I spent many years with these thoughts before I became fully aware that I was not a Human Doing, but rather a Human Being.
I’m reminded to make time for the quiet moments as God whispers and the world is loud…
It’s a lovely journey, eh ?
Blessings on your journey.
"Achievement Society demands never ending self optimization". What a pithy way to describe it, B. And completely accurate: at almost every level of my life, the assumption is that I will continue to self-optimize.
DeleteSome of this is outside of me - careers, for example, seem built on this kind of assumption - but a lot of that is inflicted on me, by me. I "feel" that I should be getting better at everything, all the time, for the rest of my life.
Interesting that while being productive and diligent is well spoken of in Scripture, "Self-improvement" as such is not addressed except in becoming more like Christ. Certainly not self-optimization.
"Being" is something modern society speaks a great deal on, but seldom reflects on.
I find the older I get, the more I am slowing down to do things right the first time versus always hurrying so I could move onto something else when I was younger.
ReplyDeleteEd, me too.
DeleteI was corrected not all that long ago in Iai training that the point is not to pound through kata. I should work on the kata I am on until instructed to move on. If that one kata is how I spend class, then there is a reason for that.