Love itself is the prime spiritual discipline. All others, including Bible study and prayer, are good only insofar as they serve to empower, amplify, or inform love.
Pianists don’t cultivate their skill and musicianship by reading books on the history of piano music or by talking with composers, as enriching and obliquely helpful as that might be. They improve by playing piano.
Similarly, the way you get better and more consistent at loving is by trying to love.
Become love plankton.
“With” is the still the word of the week.
Carla told me as I spouted some of what I was learning from the Burkeman book that she suspected I don’t undertake things when I don’t think I’ll succeed at them. That’s something worth thinking about, perhaps.
I think before I dive in to actual quotations, I should say that the main effect of this book on me is to solidify something I should have know: You can’t do everything you want. You won’t do everything you want. The sooner you get over that, the sooner you can move forward boldly with whatever you want to do, whether that’s oriented toward accomplishment or relationships or something else. (All in love, of course.) I think this takeaway would make the author happy.
And the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get (31).
Gah, I’ve sure noticed that.
If Hägglund were guaranteed an infinity of these summer vacations, there’d be nothing much to value about any one of them; it’s only the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes them worth valuing. Indeed, it’s slide only from this position of valuing what is finite because it’s finite, Hägglund argues, that one can truly care about the impact of a collective peril such as climate change, which is wreaking changes to his native country’s landscape. If our earthly existence were merely a preluded to an eternity in heaven, threats to that existence couldn’t matter in any ultimate sense (63).
The above strikes me as untrue—and it also misrepresents my Christian take on the weight of this life, although I can understand why he perceives the Christian view as this:
If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed (74).
“Pay yourself first” applies to time, too! But how do I distinguish “[my] most valued” from “other important”?
Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward…: what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is (91).
We must never forget that, especially when managing what we read and watch and listen to. People have all kinds of views on the way this world works—and it has to do with we pay attention to. With Fox News and MSNBC having been around now a while, that much is hopefully obvious. Also, that’s what I prefer not to watch TV, even fictional TV.
Can you have an experience you don’t experience? The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; and a friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a friendship in name only (94).
I should share the above with Ethan.
So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. In the words of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, they sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want” (96–97).
That is why I don’t read the news. In general, I don’t want anyone other than God, myself, my family, and my friends to indicate what is important to me. Knowing how to deal with national emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, requires that I let the government itself tell me what’s important. I guess what I’m really saying is that I have no good reason to let journalists, who are neither experts nor friends, tell me what’s important.
Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process (109).
What does that do to the problem of evil? :) Zen Buddhists certainly can’t object to theism on that basis.
It would have been one thing if the Natural Parents’ justifications for insisting on “baby-wearing,” or co-sleeping, or breastfeeding until age three had simply been that these were more satisfying ways for parents and babies to live. But their real motive, sometimes explicitly expressed, was that these were the best things to do to ensure a child’s future psychological health. (Again: no real evidence.) (130)
For the record, I was one of the “Natural Parents” whose justification was that it was more satisfying—and, I’ll add, easier that way. Also, I question his claim of “no real evidence,” but I suppose I don’t have any, so whatever.
Why…should vacations by the ocean, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work? “You keep hearing people arguing that more time off might be good for the economy,” fumed John de Graaf, an ebullient sevenths filmmaker and the driving force behind Take Back Your Time. “But why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy? It makes no sense!” (149)
That’s not a difficult rhetorical question to answer: We have to justify life in terms of the economy because making the argument to our employers, whose primary interest in our lives is, naturally, our contribution to the economy. The point holds, of course.
idleness aversion (149)
That’s a noun phrase that will requires some rumination.
Peck’s insight here—that if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself—would be helpful enough if it were merely a piece of advice for fixing lawn mowers and cars. But his larger point is that it applies almost everywhere in life: to creative work and relationship troubles, politics and parenting (179).
That might be the most important thing for me to take away from this book.
Because what is a “problem,” really? The most generic definition is simply that it’s something that demands that you address yourself to it—and if life contained no such demands, there’d be no point in anything. Once you give up the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop and appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, given each on the time it requires—that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence by the very substance of one (180–181).
The above does not strike me as true.
[Carl Jung’s] sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate” (227).
“Quietly do the next and most necessary thing.” Yes.
Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next ().
I’ve got to tell Ben and Brandon this.
“With.”
— God, in answer to another round of “What should I do?” or “How to decide what to do?”
Resolved: a solo screen sabbath from sundown Saturday through sundown Sunday.
The important part for me in leisure is a deliberate decision to engage and stay engaged. “…do it with all your might…” Remember the lesson of the ceiling at the Upper Room.
“It is a sin when someone knows the right thing to do and doesn’t do it” (James 4:17).
Community is built, not found. Therefore, stay for UBBC’s little post-service social time even though it is on Zoom.
Deliberate, unhurried, and unworried. That’s what I want to be.
If the church is the people, then the gatherings and their proceedings are at their worst an excuse to bring those people together that we might realize more our inheritance of God’s kingdom. That means I should not wring my hands to worry about proceedings, whether liturgical as in the the case of UBBC, or low-churchy, as in our house churches. If I am to be unhurried, unworried, and deliberate, then I must be so about church. I will not worry about the way church proceeds. I will simply be deliberate.
Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something, but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on “German Idealism.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald • “Head and Shoulders” (1920)
How do you reconcile the antinomy between these two excerpts from the Sermon on the Mount?
You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Your light must shine before people in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:14-15).
and
Take care not to practice your righteousness in the sight of people, to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven…[W]hen you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your charitable giving will be in secret…[W]hen you pray, go into your inner room, close your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret…[W]hen you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that your fasting will not be noticed by people but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you (Matthew 6:1,3-4,6,17).
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald • “The Rich Boy” (1926)
This made me think of Donald Trump.
New habit: When I think of someone, I will do something to indicate their importance.
“Feeling good about what you’re doing is no guarantee that you’re doing any good.”
— David Mesenbring
What I really want in this instance, as George MacDonald taught me, isn’t the forgiveness for the consequences of my sins (e.g., the wrath of God) but freedom from my actual sins. I’d like to become the father that doesn’t snap at his son. I don’t want an imputed purity. I actually want to be, myself, pure.
Good working definition of joy from Richard Beck: “great delight regardless of external circumstance.”
On the subject of the solo satisfaction of biological and psychological drives (e.g., eating, masturbating, sightseeing): As long as they are not harmful and they are undertaken with thanksgiving, they are done in love, and are thus good.
“[A] Christian sexual ethic is a process of transforming eros into agape.”
Shame and guilt can be healthy, life-giving emotions. There’s a reason we have them. Sure, shame and guilt can become toxic and debilitating. But let’s not think that there’s something unhealthy about feeling shame or guilt when you do something that violates your conscience. That’s called being a human being.
Love is hardly love if it is lazy.
“…[w]ith humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves…” (Paul). This is a crucial verse for me if I’m going to bear the fruit of love. It’s this regard of others as more important than myself that is going to turn up my inner hearth of love for others. Without that phrase, my love risks being too mechanical, too principled. If I can honestly regard others as more important than myself, I will fulfill the second Great Commandment.
But consider what Rabbi Abraham Heschel said to the members of his synagogue who complained that the words of the liturgy did not express what they felt. He told them that it was not that the liturgy should express what they feel, but that they should learn to feel what the liturgy expressed.
— Ben Patterson, as cited in Philip Yancey’s Prayer