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I checked my calendar yesterday and realized that Wednesday (tomorrow) is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. I had not noticed the days slipping by so quickly; and so, where we are, at the start of the first time of waiting, watching and preparation in the Church’s calendar. READ MORE »
Posts tagged thinking
What a day!
I like to start out my days/weeks/months with lists, and I’m sure you’ll see many more of these things from me on this blog. Back to the point, here’s what I had to do today to at least “feel” productive
- Get my annual credit report (majorly depressing, but motivating at the same time)
- Write a letter to my dad explaining the wisdom of buying rental property in town right now
- Catch up with my Bible reading plan
- Find a client’s email (something I’d been putting off)
- Hook up my printer
I did manage to get them all done, and then some. Of course, given how oddly focused and unfocused I can be sometimes, I completely forgot to bathe earlier.
My parents are the sorts that see getting out of bed after 9 as a sign of laziness, and showering in the afternoon as indicative of sloth. Now, as far as I can tell, it’s merely the act that one is rising after 9 or bathing after 12, not any of the attitudes that could be energizing those actions. But I guess that’s a failure of the human condition.
We’re always taught to look on the outside, and with good reason, ones external actions have the most effect on others, that we sometimes just toss away any sort of effort to examine a person’s motivations and attitudes, to try to get to the heart of their own story.
Jesus did say that out of a person’s heart comes everything that defiles, and that you can tell a tree by its fruit, so there is a rationale for being so keen on what we see and experience directly. But he also was known to his contemporaries as a “friend of sinners,” a drunk and a glutton as well; observations that came only with looking at the outside without bothering to see His story.
That is a constant frustration being here with my parents again. But I guess it’s more impetus for me to get going and make the most of these opportunities I’ve been scouting out as well.
Reading
It seems that my sleep schedule has been normalizing in recent days. But, at the same time, I’m almost always completely tired by late afternoon. It’s like I’m being forced away from my night owl inclinations, wretched into a direction of daytime activity, that while not bad in itself, is not really welcome either. Oh well, I’ll deal with it.
This morning, I was listening to the radio and the speaker was making a point that because we’ve moved away from words (“typology” he put it), favoring a quick succession of flashing images, like that of television or the internet, we as a cultural have largely stopped thinking, and have stopped thinking for ourselves. A good texts draws out the best of human cognitive abilities – critical thinking, idea synthesis, comparing and contrasting ideas, and a lot more. He brought up the point that only two hundred years ago, it was not not unheard of for presidential debates in the United States to last six or eight hours. Eight hours of back and forth discussion on the issues that the audience would not just sit through, but actually listen and participate all the way through. Nowadays, it’s difficult to even imagine a debate lasting more than two hours.
I have noticed that my own attention span has been steadily declining since my college days. I like the disciple of concentration and focus, but I seem to have swallowed the pill, so to speak, and joined with the flow. Perhaps that’s why I want to fall in love again with books. The internet introduced the world to huge amounts of information, more than we can absorb or process in any real fashion. I think it’s time we try to step back and learn to read again. Not merely, the short “sound bytes” of information that’s thrown at us every time we click a link, but real, in depth reading that forces us to flex our mental capacities and to think. Not just snacking on articles or the blog buffet, but spending time in enjoying a full meal of literature – fiction and non fiction.
So to that end, I think I’ll start diving into some of the books I got for Christmas. It should be enlightening if nothing else. I don’t expect to regain my focus overnight, but every little step counts.