December 23rd, Advent Day 27
Cal Newport, in his book, Digital Minimalism – Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, writes: “We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it.”
Newport sums up in a few sentences how many of us have been feeling the last few years. Our world has become noisy with notifications, social media, text messages, and a phone that is expected to be answered immediately, as we are all tethered to one that we carry in our pocket or purse. When in public, just look around. It seems that most people are staring at a screen. They do it while shopping, while dining, while driving, or in any moment when any second of boredom might occur. They are connected, yet disconnected.
As I have come to terms with a world that sees my attention as a commodity, I have had to be more and more intentional about the value of my time. While the poetic flourishes of Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden, draws the most popular attention, it was his new economics that are most meaningful to me. Philosopher Frédéric Gros notes that the theory builds on the following axiom: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
Advent is the time to evaluate how much time you are spending in the activities in which you are engaged, a cost vs. value analysis. Are you extracting real value from the things that take your time, that is, your life? For example, is our presence on social media platforms, who are in the business of clicks, advertisement, and distraction, really the assets we want them to be?
The minutes of our life are the most important resource we possess. Are you spending time nourishing and maintaining your physical body so that you can extend and more fully enjoy those minutes and be in service as God calls us? Are you taking the time to present yourself before God, through prayer and worship, so that you can hear the simple truths?
May Advent lead you to a life of intentionality. Cast away the distractions. Instead, make time for friends, for phone calls, for relationships, for work, for service, for play, for prayer, and for worship. Find that balance that will bring you peace, joy, and a deeper relationship with God.
In The Book of Common Prayer, pg. 833, we pray, “O Almighty God, who pourest out on all who desire it the spirit of grace and of supplication: Deliver us, when we draw near to thee, from coldness of heart and wanderings of mind, that with steadfast thoughts and kindled affections we may worship thee in spirit and in truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”