The world is full of too many possibilities. We can never grasp them all. We are inadequate for everything but able still to conquer more than we think. We must let go of paralysis, fear, anxiety, self-consciousness.
We get distracted. We blind ourselves staring into the sun, but the sun isn’t our aim. The world is full of obstacles and we spend too much time avoiding them. Challenges make us alive. Comfort, too much of it, deadens our senses. We need the zest, the thrill, the hurt of sweat dripping off our noses and muscles tight from exertion. We need the pain of a hard chair and tiredness of a night staying up too late writing another page, and then another, and then another, and then another.
We need hard work, because we shun hard work as a culture. Our goals are to ease the pain of work, and in so focusing on the part that is painful we lose sight of the sheer pleasure of exertion toward an admirable goal.
Work is brilliant. Work is beautiful. Work is our life. Healthy, rightful play
is work. We have, most of us, even forgotten how to play well. Instead we seek to be amused, which is not active involvement but passive reception.
We listen to music rather than make it. We pretend our exploits via video games rather than attempt them. We watch others live and laugh and hurt and love and conquer and die on the movie screen rather than walk outside and take the risk ourselves. We detach ourselves from life by engaging ourselves in non-life, in imitations of life: ear phones, cell phones, computer screens, chat rooms, social pages, news feeds, blog posts, newspapers, radio, streaming music, youtube videos, texting, messaging, uploading, downloading, saving, reformatting, watching not a bird or a real person but an actor, listening not to the wind or the waves or the sound of a voice next to us, something real, but to a recording of something real.
None of these things are bad, but it is bad that they have become all that we are. We define ourselves on-line rather than in life. We spend more time thinking of a cute status update or a great tag line on our blog than we do thinking of a sister’s birthday gift or a conversation with a friend. We are so busy recording life into pixelated pieces that we are neglecting to live it.
The trouble isn’t technology, it is human laziness and apathy and the ease with which we roll into the rut beside us. This problem was around long before the computers lit up, and it will continue to be around long after the next fifteen thousand technologies come and go. We can lose ourselves in anything that amuses, entertains, swallows us up without providing any value.
We call it leisure but it is not; it does not refresh or rejuvenate us, it drains us of energy and leaves us blinking and yawning. It is the feeling of stepping out of the movie theater into the bright afternoon sun, surprised to find that a whole world has been happening while we were lost in another. One is real, one is not. There is nothing wrong with make-believe. We need pretend, fantasy, and ways to escape. But we need a life to escape from, not just a series of trap doors leading from one escape route to another. This is why entertainment fails to entertain us: we have too much of it. We have no contrast. Everything is technicolor.
The cost is life. We fill up our space with too many little things and then we are too busy running around trying to keep them all connected, putting them in place, keeping up with them, taking advantage of our advantages. We end up worn out by our own luxuries. A lot less of everything is what we need.
Less food to choose from might help us to enjoy our daily bread without wishing we had gone to the other restaurant instead.
It’s easy to get focused on the wrong things. The world is fighting for your focus, and if you forget you are in a battle, it will be easy to get distracted. If you allow the world to grab and hold your attention, then you’ll spend hours listening to and thinking about the world’s messages – instead of God’s – and as a result, you won’t be able to do what you really want and need to do (
How to Be Your Best When You Feel Your Worst, Casey Treat, pp 34-35).
The ache we feel in our chests, the dissatisfaction with where we are and what we have, the urge that sends us to the mall, to the Internet, to the television or the club or the movie or the concert is not for something more to see or hear or buy or experience. The ache is to do, to produce, to be valuable.
Some of us are realizing that, and we see the results in all sorts of wonderful ways: backyard gardens, home made loaves of bread and preserved fruit, carefully crafted quilts, reinvented vintage clothes, entire marketplaces of hand made offerings from jewelry to toys to furniture to art.
Some of us are still caught in a culture that has yet to slow down enough to acknowledge the ache for what it is. Don’t let yourself be one of those. Don’t let the quick urgent pull of purchasing blind you to the deeper satisfaction of being a producer more than you are a consumer. Add more value to the world than you take away. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable (as you will be if you resist the culture even a small bit) and you will find your life rising up within you, carrying you further than you knew you could go. That’s living.
