What We Need Is Here

Given that...

You live in a box; what are you going to do? Who doesn't have parameters in their life - chosen ones as well as those in which we seem to be captured at the moment? The family box, the job box, the school box, the geographical location box, the salary box, the marriage box, the physical limitation box, the age box, etc. My friend, over coffee earlier this week, described her own box. She's a smart, vibrant, beautiful, loving single mom who is balancing graduate school and life with her boy - with very little time for anything else. She described how the necessities of life can feel like barriers to actually living. She feels hamstrung by school schedules, homework assignments, meal times, meetings, and all the other things on her daily to-do list. She recently came up with a way of reframing the issue - a mantra that helps her live within the boundaries, without being boxed in: given that.

Given that I am responsible for taking care of this child's needs, this is what is possible today. Given that I am in graduate school and constantly have something that needs to be written or read, this is what I can do with my weekend or holiday. Given that we need to eat dinner and I'm the only one cleaning it up, this is what's on the menu. It helps her focus on the reality, even the actual spaciousness of that particular reality, if she acknowledges,but doesn't dwell on, her boundaries. We all have them, even as they are constantly changing. Given that I have teenagers (at this time), given that this is my job (for the moment), given that it is raining (today), given that I am broke (for now).... this is what is possible for me today.

Acknowledging today's boxes is a good preamble to the age-old remedy for self-pity and overwhelm - "counting your blessings." It's healthy and smart to look at the limitations squarely and clear the air for the rest of the truth: the actual possibilities that are also part of each day. Whoever we are, whatever today’s constraints.

Talking to her reminded me of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a wonderful book that addresses the psychological responses to a truly ungodly 20^th century constraint – life in a concentration camp. Frankl was a pioneer in the new field of psychiatry when he, a Viennese Jew, was shipped off to a concentration camp where he remained for three years. While there he observed various responses to abject suffering and degradation. Some prisoners immediately shut down in despair and killed themselves or wasted away quickly. Others contrived to gain special favors by aiding their oppressors, and some responded by finding a way to live fully in the most constraining situation possible by sharing what little they had,  encouraging and comforting others, and basically living by the values they held in their previous lives.  The fact that some were capable of this led him to imagine we might all have that capacity and he made it his work to understand and encourage that response in his patients.

The key was finding meaning in our lives, no matter their circumstances. To believe there is some purpose for our being here despite the drudgery , some possibility for activating that purpose in whatever circumstance, is crucial to living fully, or even to feeling like you're actually living at all.  Along with other contemprorary existentialists, he saw meaning as a construct, and he went on to practice what he called logotherapy - helping others find and/or construct meaning in their own day-to-day lives because what's going on inside our heads is at least as important as what's going on outside ourselves. 

Anyway. I’ve used a version of this kind of thinking regularly in the past as a kind of knee-jerk reaction to temporary discomfort or distress, imagining a much more heroic version of myself getting through a much more difficult existence. But my friend’s mantra seems like a shortcut to that state of mind, and requires little drama or even imagination. Given that these are my circumstances today, what is it I want to do with my “one wild and precious life?” 

 

Holy Days

The End of Summer has become a holy season for me. It's not just the waning of summer heat - although I am apt to fall on my knees in gratitude the first night the temperature dips into the sixties. These weeks have become a time-out-of-time to ponder, reassess, and move forward. It starts around my birthday in late August, which I've often thought of it as a last gasp opportunity (after the New Year and Lent) for "resolutions" and the possibility of actually following through with a few of them. It continues through the early weeks of September. In recent years, the anniversary of my son's cancer diagnosis has added to the pondering, and to its complexity.

A bit of wisdom I feel I've gleaned from this is how perspective shifts over time. This year, Ben called me the day before what is known among a lot of cancer survivors as "D-Day" to confirm that it was indeed that next day - a very good sign that the memory is receding a bit. He was planning on celebrating the six year anniversary with a heroic bike ride up a very steep, 2-mile mountain road near his college - six times (he did it!). He said what I have often thought in recent years: "If I had only known during those years how things were going to turn out, it would have been so much easier."

Yes, indeed. That is what perspective is all about. Six years out, things look different than we saw and lived them at the time. From my own perspective as a mother, I was almost entirely focused at that time on protecting my child,  whatever it took. But the fact that I was also responsible to Ben's three siblings - all young adults at the time: a brother beginning his sophomore year in college, a recently graduated sister starting her first week at work, and another sister who had just become a mother - called me out of that laser beam focus occasionally. My own head and heart would be crumbling with despair at his latest complication and his overall prognosis, but I would gather myself together to explain things to my children in the best light possible, with hope and the details that supported that hope. Ben was strong and young, he was getting the best care possible, we were with him day and night. Telling the story to them helped me reframe it for myself. And it was all true, as true as my fear.

Even in regular day-to-day life, I've found this to be a helpful technique in gaining perspective. During stressful times, telling your story from a different angle - in the third person or from a different time frame can truly help one get a grip on the complex reality of it.  "It was a strange year, full of change and confusion ..." or "She sometimes wonders if she can make it to Friday, much less to old age." A bit dramatic, yes, but somehow seeing myself as a character in an un-folding story, or an actor in the middle of a movie, helps me see that more is coming that I don't know yet, and that I have a hand in shaping at least a part of the tale. 

This is the key, I think. To somehow get yourself to wondering what will happen next, instead of dreading what you most fear. Curiosity instead of cringing. One interesting thing about life is that we never know the ending. And as comforting as it might be to have someone whisper to us what happens next, what kind of life would that be? We need possibility in all its limitlessness - we need the capacity to realize hope, even in the darkest times.

Pema Chodron was one of my guides during that hard time and still. "The gloriousness of life and the wretchedness of life need each other. . . We can become quite arrogant whenever everything is going our way." Wretchedness, and even the depression that sometimes follow, is the muck we work with to create something interesting at least, if not always beautiful. We have to find a way to open up to "the whole thing," she says.

I think we must have an innate capacity to do this. The anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 falls during these holy weeks too. This tenth anniversary seemed to me to focus less on politics and more on individual and communal loss, and love for one another. Watching footage from that time and listening to the immediate commentaries, what you heard from the "(wo)man on the street" is not the rhetoric we heard from our leaders justifying retaliation. What we heard was heartbroken grief at the immensity of the loss of human life and wondrous gratitude and love toward the people who reached out to one another that day. You hear deep pride in our resiliency, and in our ability to suffer great loss and open up instead of shut down. A glass of water to a stranger, a held hand, and "are you okay" echoing all over the blasted cities and rippling outward.

Because it is possible to let sorrow and grief and shocking twists of fate soften us, I want to believe in it as a way forward. It is hard to stay there, as we saw post-9/11 and as we witness in other tragedies. There is choice in there someplace - to cringe and harden or to reach out and wonder. From my current vantage point in middle-age, I can tell you that on a personal level it is an ongoing struggle that does not get easier. But it does get interesting, more so with each year. And that is why all anniversaries are worth celebrating, or at least observing - the ones obviously life-giving like a birthday, and the ones that continue to shape a life, which are often hugely difficult at the time. It is so big, so complex, so difficult, and so beautiful. C'est la vie. In late summer, I am reminded to keep my eyes open wide, seeking wonder, giving gratitude.  

 

Going gray

I like the idea of calling them “sparkles,” but they are - honestly - a pretty dull gray.  I began to notice the transformation underway on my head a few years ago, when I was in enough personal tumult I couldn’t bear to add one more thing to my list of life-changes. I dyed my fading hair several different colors, badly, before getting some professional help from my sweet, nearly lifelong hairdresser who began blonding-up the new hairs every few months. But it's costly, and after a few years of it I began to wonder what it would be like if I just let it be.    

I remember imagining, as a child, what I might look like when I grew up. Then, there was no sense of dread or loss, just curiosity. I simply "wondered"  - in a que sera, sera kind of way - what would be. If we lived in a culture that appreciated aging, if we acknowledged the growth and the wisdom obtained over the course of a human life, might we be a little more open to this change, or even see some beauty in it? As it is, I have an oppressive feeling that going gray is failing somehow. But at what? Beating back time? Keeping myself up (as opposed to letting myself go)? Who says?  

A lot of us, unfortunately. The hair-dying is just the tip of the iceberg. I have a friend who, at forty, went to a well-respected dermatologist to have a mole looked at and also got a free lecture on all the ways he could improve her face - removing laugh and frown lines, plumping up her lips, "a little here, a little there."   I have a younger friend whose husband gave her a breast-lift and tummy tuck for her birthday following the birth of their second child. God forbid we appear to have actually lived during our lives. This does not happen in the same way to men whose graying temples are considered distinguished and whose wrinkles add a certain amount of panache in the middle years. This worries me too. Is it simply biology? Instinct makes us perceive signs of aging as indicators of security and experience in men, but only of lost reproductive potential in women? This is kind of dreadful.

But I have been gradually going gray in other areas of my life too, and this has been - honestly - wondrous. Things are simply less black-and-white than they were in the brighter days of my youth when I thought I knew so much. The world I inhabit these days is much more nuanced. I have seen, heard, and done a lot I would not have imagined when I was a young woman. As I look at those thirty years of choices - my own and those of others - with some distance, I tend to see the whole thing as a lot more mysterious that I would have thought possible back in the day. I couldn't see then the wonderful outcomes of my worst decisions or some of the difficult times that followed the ones I made most carefully. Real life is even more colorful than I had imagined. Categorizing, labeling, and judging is complex to the point of being futile. 

Looking back from this place in the road, I see a winding path indeed, partly of my own making, partly coincidental, with plenty of unexpected twists and potholes that put an end to some of my careful plans and assumed ideas. Following some of those bumps off the path, I found myself looking for tracks in the mud from those who had gone on ahead of me, for some worthy guides in the fresh territory.

I still seek those tracks. When I look at the women I most admire, they have had the interesting, unexpected lives that those who resist falling into role-playing, or truth-hiding, can have. They had false starts, and backtracks, and a certain amount of floundering. They aren't necessarily "pretty" and neither are their lives. They are "beautiful" instead, with their skinned knees and messy play-clothes, their deep wrinkles, bright, curious eyes - and gray hair.  

What does the world need now? More women desperately trying to quash the consequences of the adventure of living? Or those wearing their real age proudly? I think we need more graying women out there, dancing. More hard-laughing, recklessly ageing grown-ups delighting in the mystery and wonder of it all - as it is. We need women who just don't have the time to keep checking themselves in the mirror or against the latest magazine ads. Srong and resilient, gracious and flexible women, appropriately worn a bit around the edges; women who are gray, silver, and whitening, lightening up. And while I entertain the real possibility of a bright-headed future version of myself down the line, it will not be because she is hiding something, but because she is expressing on her head a true inner brilliance, vibrancy, and  joie de vivre. We deserve some joy after all this living, not shame-filled slinking around. For me, for now, that means going a bit grayer. 

Someday...

[photo: Advanced Style - I love this blog!]

Getting things done - one pomodoro at a time

Sometimes I think my laptop is a little too versatile. I may sit down to record tutoring hours, take an online class, send an important email, or write, but I am only the tap of a finger away from checking Facebook, my email inbox or the weather report. (This is in addition to the fact that I am a few yards away from laundry that needs to be folded, dishes that could use washing, a hallway desperate for painting, and my yoga mat.) I find focusing to be a real challenge to getting the things done I want to each day. 

Over the last year, I’ve tried out a few good things I’d like to share. First, I found Now Do This. So simple, but strangely helpful  to have a little online app hanging out on your toolbar, reminding you what you set out to do, one thing at a time. You make the list – "put clothes in wash," "balance checkbook," "tutor student," "write about pomodoros" - and each appears in stark simplicity on a white screen until you finish the task and press “done,” at which point up pops the next task. When you reach the end of the list, a cheerful “all done!” message appears. It's very satisying. 

For the longer term and the bigger picture, I have found Todoist to be a help.  You list your projects and break them down into tasks with assigned dates.  For instance, some of my projects for this summer were house reorganization, finishing a cookbook, and spending quality time with family and friends. Tasks for the house project included assigning each room of the house a day or two here and there during the summer and recurrent garden chores like weeding or watering. The cookbook project was broken down into tasks like discussing format with the printer, deciding on illustrations, choosing recipes, and writing chapter introdutions. Goals for time with family and friends included regular outings to places around town with the children, learning to play cribbage, and meeting various friends for coffee.  Each day when I log on to the site it tells me what’s on the agenda for that day (or for a perfect version of the day anyway) as well as what’s still on the list from a few days ago. Again, there is the satisfying ticking off of things - but with the added pleasure of watching the tasks required for each project number down as you approach completion.   

For writing tasks that require stretches of serious focus, I have recently started using Ommwriter. It offers a very clean page to work on with no visible toolbar distractions. There are several choices of peaceful background music, which is great if you’re working someplace like a coffee shop – or your own noisy home. One option includes a pleasant typewriter tapping noise as you write. It helps create a refreshing little zone of peace and productivity.

The latest thing I’ve tried is the tomato-timer. Inspired by the Pomodoro Technique whose creator used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (pomodoro is Italian for tomato) to create timeslots of intense focus, the "pomodoro" chops time into 25 minute intervals after which the buzzer goes off and a five-minute break is allowed. After four pomodoros, you get a 30-minute long break. What is helpful about this for me is that I don’t have to keep time or think about it, and that I am less overwhelmed by the stretch of hours that may be required to finish something I'm not excited about doing. I can just set my sights on focusing for a relatively short period of time, knowing I can soon take a little break to compulsively check email, fold laundry, or reward myself with a little yoga. 

The big kahuna of these focus-enhancing apps is a concept called Getting Things Done or GTD – an entire goal-setting and organizational strategy that both intrigues and scares me a little, mainly because of all the spin-off products for sale to help you implement it. The actual concept is simple though and fits well with the applications above: to set goals, to break them down into manageable steps, to take things one at a time AND – this is GTD’s particular strength – to keep things organized so that you don’t spend a lot of time getting on task, or finding the things you need to accomplish it.

While it may seem a little odd to have to resort to online apps to keep ones online life in control, it makes a kind of sense.  Like the answering machine and ringer volume control that developed over time with the telephone, the online world is offering ways to manage its own omnipresence in our lives.  The little machine on which I am typing is clearly both a blessing and a curse. I no longer pedal several miles to an office to access my computer files (and giant file cabinet) like I did only a few years ago. It’s all right here, ALL right here.  While there are times during the year when deadlines and structure are set by a stricter work schedule (and times during life that are regulated by the length of the baby’s nap and other family obligations), this particular summer has been much less structured. For those of us prone to distraction and juggling a number of different projects at the same time, (I am so tempted to say “whose lives have a number of windows open at once!), it’s interesting to see what others have come up with to help. And consoling to know there are others in need of this kind of help. 

Do you struggle with focus, follow-through, and temptation? How do you manage? 

 

Home Economics

I took Home Ec in 7^th grade, but I think mine may have been the last generation to do so.  It went the way of “shop” (the "boy" version of this practical course). Together they covered a lot of good, practical stuff: preparing food, mending (or making) clothes, creating a budget, building things, making repairs. Unfortunately, I think the disappearance of these classes mirrored the decline of passing this know-how down to one’s children; so few young people I know seem to have learned these skills growing up – although I’ve met more and more lately who want to learn.  It also reflects, I’m afraid, the loss of dignity these humble practices had undergone.

“Home Economics” is an idea whose time has come, again – but an updated version that goes beyond my 1970s course, some of which had degenerated into preparing frozen peas and other products from the free corporate cookbook.  The word economy comes from the Greek oikonomia, which literally means “rules of the household.”  I like how Wendell Berry’s definition puts this in context of the common good, as “the ways of human housekeeping, the ways by which the human household is situated and maintained within the household of nature.” How we could use these skills now - to make things, to take care of things, to prioritize and budget, to build and repair - all in light of how our actions impact those with whom we share this place.     

We struggle to come up with rules for our own household that move us toward fitting in more responsibly with the household of nature as well as with respect toward each other and our guests. I find it annoyingly challenging. The whole subject of “housekeeping” has no small amount of baggage for me, and I have often asked John to cover it, fearing falling into gender roles or, worse, the awful nagging-mother role (I think I’m about done with this character).  I believe that “rules of the household”  - like how to arrange and label food in the fridge so it doesn’t go to waste, or to wash and dry dishes so water is not wasted and dishes are actually clean, which cleaning supplies to use on what, so that floors, appliances and people are not damaged,  or the way to hang clothes so they’ll dry faster and more loads can be hung in a day – do matter financially, environmentally, and even socially (no one likes the person who leaves their dirty dishes in the sink or never empties the drainer). But still I’m uncomfortable always being the one expounding them or patrolling the aftermath.

Honestly, I hate it. I think caring for the household, for the well-being of the people and things in it, is regularly scoffed at as trivial precisely because it’s been traditionally the work of women, not because this work is unimportant or unnecessary.   I end up torn between doing what is right and good for our household and the planet and perpetuating harmful stereotypes by  - god forbid – nagging.  I cringe at the thought of nagging - having to ask (repeatedly) someone to do something they would do without being asked if they concerned themselves with keeping  various household items safe, in good working order, and/or out of the landfill. The word itself is almost always applied to women,  most often  by someone who is disinclined to do the thing needing to be done because it’s a bother  or is deemed somehow beneath them. Accusing one of nagging is just incredibly disrespectful of exactly the thing that’s needed right now if we’re going to have a planet to pass on to our children and grandchildren. Thoughtful, caring respect for the things – and the people – in our lives isn’t idol worship, or the trivial occupation of women with too much time of their hands. It’s common sense for the common good.  

 So, my friends, teach your children well. It’s likely that during their lifetime, they’ll be caring more for the few(er) things they own, rather than simply blithely tossing what’s been neglected and hopping in the car to go buy a new one.  “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without” is not just a kitschy plaque at “Cracker Barrel” to remind of us of how quaintly our grandparents used to live. It’s savvy foresight, something that has also always been part of “women’s work.” 

{photo: Food News with Attitude}

Brave New World of distractions

- Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death

Contrary to common belief, Aldous Huxley [Brave New World] and George Orwell [1984] did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns us that we will be overcome by an externally controlled oppression. But in Huxley's version, no big brother is needed to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore their technologies, that actually undo their capacity to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World, Revisited, civil libertarians and rationalists were ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, failed to take into account man's almost infinite capacity for distraction. In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they're controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate and fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we think we love will ruin us. 

{photo: a work of art by Zach Franzen}

Growing at the edge

Do one thing every day that scares you. - Eleanor Roosevelt

It is at the edges that we find bold, eye-opening combinations of living beings, events, possibilities - all growing together. Our North Florida wetlands are a good example - where changing boundaries between swamp, forest, and pond create a habitat for plants and animals found nowhere else. "Third places," where diverse groupings of people can gather, spark a similar vitality; we try for this at our House. I remember when the "food security movement" began as a strange and – at the time - unlikely combination of environmentalists, farmers, academics, and foodies gathered to compare notes and offer their unique perspective to a new and vital idea.

Yet, as life-giving as this space can be, we mostly fear the insecurity of the edge. It goes against the grain to seek out difference, and culturally we get a lot of signals to stay put (if we're in a culturally approved situation) or to get into one as quickly as possible if not. Many of us have to choose to "scare" ourselves, to knock us out of our little worlds and to help us see things from a different and larger perspective. Eventually most of us get knocked out by some catastrophe at some point in our lives - a life-threatening illness, the loss of a job, the death of a loved-one, parenthood, a natural disaster (notice how I snuck parenthood into that list of traumas?) The folks I've known who've seemed best able to weather these inevitable upendings, are the ones who've made the choice to go to their own edges regularly and deliberately.

 How do you scare yourself? Where are your edges – body, mind, spirit? How can we "practice" visiting the edges of our own lives, where we find ourselves map-less, and instruction-less – where we realize we're charged with writing our own?

Some modest ideas: Find out how far you can go – walk, run or cycle to your edge, go ahead and speak the language you studied in high school to a native speaker, respectfully talk with a person who has a different ideology, be with someone who is seriously ill or dying or otherwise suffering, ask for forgiveness, work with others to right a wrong, go someplace where you will stand out as "different." These are all small things really, and maybe your edges are much further out there. But for many of us, the task is to push the envelope on our own comfortable lives, and the thought of not being as fit as you think, of embarrassing yourself, of not knowing what to say or do, of standing out as "odd" are hugely challenging issues behind our little avoidances.

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement once said that our job (as Catholic Workers) is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  We're all on one side of the other of that equation at various times in our life.  It's when we're sitting pretty on the comfortable side of things that we can choose to approach the edge where we can grow. Who really wants to just sit pretty? 

{Photo: Hogtown Creek in the 8th Avenue wetlands}

 

Monday Wondering

WONDER: A feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.

1. Cherish this ecstasy  "however senseless it may seem."  

2. Bill McKibben in the Washington Post on the connection between recent mega-tornadoes in the midwest and climate change.

3. Frederick Buechner on pain: "Pain can become a treasure if we treasure it to the point where it can become compassion and healing, not just for ourselves, but also for other people."

4. The Opulence Bubble - Umair Haque in the Harvard Business Review: " We can step out of the tired, toxic, comfort zone - and create the future."

4. I want to be an Urban Bush Woman.

The Food Underground

Each week they're in production, we have eggs and goat cheese delivered to the house by our farming friends: beautiful, colorful, eggs in different shapes and sizes to boil for the Breakfast Brigade, and mild, tasty goat cheese for the cafe (among other things).  

We're happy to pay a fair price for this local food offered by people we know well. We know that by buying from them rather than from a national chain - even one that offers organic produce - we're keeping money circulating in our local economy. We also trust the care both of these suppliers put into their particular operation; their animals are well-loved and healthy, they pay attention to sanitation because they eat this food themselves, and they are careful with the environment ramifications of animal ownership because they live on the land where the animals are kept. Kelley (the goatherd) has been able to expand her clientele by having our house be a pick-up location for others buying the cheese. One other buyer referred to the whole operation as the "underground cheese railroad." 

I love being able to participate in something so homegrown, healthy, and basically good. Fear has often been the basis of our overly complicated food system - where complex methods of sanitation have been required to guard against bacteria and disease resulting from overcrowded animal quarters and mechanized production. Many of these safeguards have been made into laws that keep small producers from making a living selling food that is healthier for the environment, for the animals, and for us. Our friends, Susan and Kelly, living on the land with their animals and eating the same food they're selling to us offer real food security.  

Digital Detox

The week after Eater was "Digital Detox Week," formerly known as "Turn Off Your Television Week." I did not participate. We've become very reliant on Facebook and email for coordinating volunteers for the House. To be honest, I use these two modes of communication like I used to use the phone; my children reach me this way, and so does everyone else. The difference between this and the phone though – or at least my phone – is that turning on my laptop to check or compose email also puts me within a couple clicks of all kinds of distractions. I am frequently distracted. 

The worry that "media" is luring us away from something more deserving of our attention is old as the hills – or at least as old as my mother, whose own mom used to warn her about reading too many comic books. During my childhood, we were frequently admonished to go out and play after we'd sat in front of cartoons too long. I kept the tv in a closet of my own children's childhood; later I worried about what they were accessing on the computer. It's an enduring issue.  

Recently I stumbled upon some age-old responses – in a theological journal.  Douglas V. Henry, author of the article "Curiosity and Smartphones" posed the question, "Can we live virtuously in a virtual world?" He explored the definitions of two ancient Greek terms (as theologians are wont do to)  to examine the issue. Curiositos and studiositos are two types of "intellectual appetite." Both seek knowledge, but they are different, Henry points out, in that curiositos wants possession, while studiositos seeks participation.  The curious, Henry says, want to own, conquer, and possess information. They're concerned with novelty and tend to "chase information" reveling in getting there first, "reporting the even more recently posted Facebook entry, blog comment, or random news item" - usually hoping to show their superiority by doing so. The studious, on the other hand, prefer "repeated, deepening encounters with what they can always know only partially." They don't look for "spectacle."  The part about what can be known only partially is theological language, but I think it can be translated secularly as "the big questions" – or issues more complicated, at least, than the fashion faux pas of movie stars or late-breaking quotes from Charlie Sheen. 

I'm not sure how much of my own screen time falls into each of these categories. Henry concludes that even the smartphone can be a useful tool in a good life, but the idea of a fast – either as a remedy to disordered behavior or as a period of discernment – still attracts me. Maybe this summer when things quiet down a little here. 

{photo - me checking email (or something) during a fall trip to the mountains}