On the Common 119

Dear Modern World

Hello and welcome to Thursday.

Baseball is well and truly upon us, and I wanted to draw your attention to the kind gestures the Boston Red Sox have made toward the Wakefield family. Tim Wakefield was one of our best pitchers in the years that we broke the Curse of the Bambino–he was a knuckleballer (more on what that means here).

He died of brain cancer late last year, and his widow succumbed to another form of cancer just five months later. The Red Sox opened their season paying tribute.

Jason Varitek hugging Wakefield’s daughter, Brianna.

Go Sox.

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The Part Where There’s an Essay: Dear Modern World

Dear Modern World,

Please miss me with the optimization talk. 

Today I cannot take one more comment about what to eat, when to eat, how to move, when to move, how to think, how to breathe, how to sleep, how to LIVE.

You have taken the pleasure of a barefoot walk in the grass and turned it into “grounding.”

You have put an analysis tool on all my friends’ wrists and caused them to judge their breathing, their activity, their sleep. Are we doing enough? Really? But could we be doing better? How can we optimize?

OPTIMIZE!

I am all in favor of using our hours and bodies wisely. Yes, amen! Psalm 90:12 encourages us to “...number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Let’s do that!

Let’s not: micromanage every second and turn ourselves into machines to be hacked rather than human beings with spirits, hearts, flaws, trials, and victories.

Let’s not: forget the Holy Spirit is at work.

Let’s not: mistake our Christian walk, and one another’s lives, for a factory line rather than a growing organism.

Dear modern world, go out and look at the sky. Do not look at the sky for the sake of hitting your optimal heart rate on your fitness app. Look at the sky because you are a human, and it is the sky, and you need to remember that from time to time.

Dear modern world, go for a walk. Do not go for a walk to record it in your fitness app or hit a perfect number of workouts this week. Go for a walk because, from the dawn of time, walking has really helped people clear their heads. Sun is good for you, and so is the rain. Go walk in it.

Dear modern world, take off your shoes and walk on your grass. Do not walk on your grass because that guy on Instagram told you to. Walk in the grass because one time, when you were a littler person, before you knew what Instagram was, you knew that it was fun and it felt good.

Use your body. Use your mind. Rest. Eat. Enjoy the days that God has given you under the sun.

Love,

Kelly

Here is what I have seen to be good: It is appropriate to eat, drink, and experience good in all the labor one does under the sun during the few days of his life God has given him, because that is his reward.- Ecclesiastes 5:18

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For the Anglophiles

Last week at work, a very troubling report circulated about “balloon syndrome” in hedgehogs. Our company’s mascot is a hedgehog, so we have an above-average interest in these little creatures.

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Reads & Listens of the Week

The Church Loses When Our Arts Communities Die. “Are we more influenced by beauty that orients us to the strange and unexpected work of God in the world—or by political slogans and self-help books?”

This elephant just wanted to go for a walk instead of getting a bath.

If you’re a writer trying to plod along faithfully, and all the algorithms get you down, maybe this post from Lore Wilbert will help you as much as it helped me: You Don’t Have to Quit Instagram. “Followers are not readers and if you are a writer, you want readers. Followers don’t buy books, readers do!”

But on the other hand, No One Buys Books, anyway. *sigh*

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The world doesn't stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have only been on the edge of it. ― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow