New Normal
One of the worst things we’ve normalized is always being reachable: making people think they deserve an instant response to texts, emails, comments, and voicemails. We’ve conditioned other people (and ourselves) that our promptness is some kind of virtue, that the more quickly we respond, the more responsible we are. The expectation this places on each of us is unrealistic and it is not sustainable. We cannot be perpetually available and still be fully present.
We are inundated with requests and needs and news. Now, more than ever, we need to withdraw to silence and stillness and solitude and disappear for a bit. Doing so isn’t a betrayal of our work or the people in our path, but a way of preparing us to be fully present to it all. In those times when we pull away from the crowd (if we can) our minds are recalibrated and our reserves replenished, and when we return to the world we are better able to offer our undivided selves.
John Pavlovitz
…we should be careful of issuing judgments without knowing the facts. That mobs are poor diviners of truth. That institutions have a duty to transcend the passions of the moment.
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-oberlin-culture-war-of-2016-finally-comes-to-an-end/
“Disagreements can feel like a war in which the fighters dig trenches on either side of any issue and launch their beliefs back and forth like grenades. You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked. These sorts of fights might give everyone involved some short-term satisfaction—they deserve it because I am right and they are evil!—but odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper. If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.”
Arthur Brooks
“You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t overestimate your self-knowledge.”
Dr. Jordon Peterson
…there’s obvious danger in freely expressing your thoughts. Most of us have deep knowledge about a narrow set of topics and shallow knowledge (at best) about most everything else. Speak constantly and you will expose your ignorance. It’s guaranteed.
David French
“Forgetfulness leads to exile, memory to redemption.” Morally deficient leaders want the past forgotten; the morally sensitive leaders want never to forget lest we end up there again.
Hasidic saying
In our world, disagreement is not about a difference of perspective, but a conflict between fundamental goodness and badness. With little room for forgiveness, it is easy to become narcissists of opinion. Our entire moral self-image becomes wrapped up in correctness, and anyone who disagrees with us must not only be wrong, but morally deficient. We so fiercely want to be “good” that even considering the perspective of another is itself a morally polluting act.
Emma Camp
Living in a fog
My retirement life has brought a metaphor from driving experiences into sharp focus. It’s noting the difference between life viewed “in the windshield” versus life viewed “in the rear-view mirror.” The first rushes towards you as you speed ahead, giving but a short vision of what’s to come. The second recedes slowly into the distance, accompanied by the memory of the long road that has gone before. Life in the windshield is, to my mind, particularly an experience of youth. The world and the future hurry towards them and seem to be, by far, the most important part of the road. The rear-view mirror is the world of the aging. What I remember (as I near 70) is far more important than what is yet to come – there’s so much more of it. In that light, the doctrine of divine providence often seems more obvious to the elderly than it does to the young. We stand at different points of observation.
There is, though, the problem of the “fog.” When driving into a heavy fog, both what is ahead and what is behind are obscurred. We drive at something approaching a state of blindness. I think there are moments in history (as well as our personal lives), when the fog encloses us and both the providence of the past as well as the way forward are hidden. …
Those concerns reveal the “modernity” in my own heart. Our deep habits, nurtured in so many ways, tend towards management. We imagine ourselves to be in charge of history’s outcomes. As such, we nurture within ourselves a “market” for information. News of the world, of events, and trends seem (to us) to be required reading and listening. We even think to ourselves, “How will I know how to pray if I don’t know what is going on?” The corrollary to that thought is, “How will God know what is going on if I don’t tell Him?”
Fr Stephen Freeman
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2022/04/13/life-in-the-fog-of-the-world/
View from the front porch
It has been disappointing to not have opened the front porch yet. The weather has not cooperated and I have sorely missed mornings on the porch. Perhaps opening the porch this weekend will change the weather. Looking forward to some much need inspiration.
Still on the Journey