"... number our days."

 

When I turned 49 this past December, I knew it was time to get serious about how I spend my time. Fortunately by reading the Bible over the years, I’ve noticed that a lot of ink has been spent reminding us we’re going to die. Although full of passages focusing on the almost comical brevity of human existence, one particular chapter - Psalm 90 - also asks God to bless us “with a heart of wisdom, so that we may number our days.”

            Perhaps this verse is open to some interruption, but one takeaway seems to be that we need to take ownership for how we spend our time. Life is too much of a gift (and also too short) to waste it. Therefore - as moral agents with free will - we need to be fruitful, and, towards that end, it’s helpful to find a way to “number our days.”

Don’t worry. This concept has been validated by brain science and even pop psychology, so we know it’s legitimate. It turns out one of the oldest tricks in the self-help book is collecting data. If we want to change something about ourselves - whether it’s a weight loss goal or finding time to crochet - the first thing we need to do is measure it. Fortunately for no one except me, I’m pretty introspective by nature, and over the years I’ve pinpointed three “bad habits” that have been stumbling blocks on my overall quest to be the best uncertified life coach I can be: beer, cake, and Facebook.

So, at the start of this year, to help me “number my days,” so to speak, I simply started writing down these numbers: the amount of beers I drank; the pieces of cake (or any related sweet nonsense) I scarfed down; and the amount of minutes I scrolled like a zombie on social media. And, after six months, I decided I don’t drink that much beer, my sugar intake is not as bad as yours, but my mindless scrolling averaged out to about ten minutes a day. Again, this might not sound terrible, but after half a year, that adds up to close to 1900 minutes, or over 31 total hours!

 Yikes!

  And those, of course, are waking hours, many of them when my kids were in the room, when my wife was in the room, when I certainly had better things I could have been doing. Take that memoir, for example, about Annaka’s liver transplant I’ve been supposedly “writing” for seven years? What would thirty-one hours, or even ten hours, have done to that big task? More importantly, though, what conversations or fun memories did I miss or only partially experience because I was too distracted by what was going on down the road or across the ocean?

Before continuing, I know there’s some irony in the amount of grief I devote to social media, considering you’re plausibly reading this on your phone. Social media, just like nearly any human invention, is not inherently bad, I just don’t think our brains are wired to process the amount we try to process. We’re simply not designed to “know” what we try to know on any given day without the dosage of supposedly “crucial” information becoming emotionally toxic.

It’s just too much. We’re poisoning our minds, and everyone in our circle pays the price.

Another book I often read is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. For close to ten years I’ve taught this novel to multiple sections of sophomores each Spring. Towards the end of the story, Aunt Alexandra hosts a “Missionary Tea” in the Finch home. Like many organized gatherings of bored adults, however, the official purpose of the tea takes a distance second to the true function, which is to gossip.

Scout as narrator is fascinated by this, her first true foray into the mysterious world of  Maycomb women. She is also confused by their remarkable hypocrisy. Mere moments after bemoaning the plight of strangers thousands of miles away that can only be saved by their divinely sanctioned do-gooding, these supposedly Christian ladies spew condescending judgement on another “tribe” of God’s children just down the road - Maycomb’s Black community.

            I always pause here in my classroom, to make certain students understand Harper Lee’s point. While there’s obviously nothing wrong with helping folks a half a world away, (and many of us are called to do just that) we are also expected to love our actual neighbor. Although the ladies of the missionary tea society thought they were “loving” Africans they would never meet by trying to get them to heaven, they were hating their real neighbors down the road by making their lives hell.

 Perhaps wasting our time scrolling at the expense of our loved ones is not as drastic a vice as what Scout experiences, but it is a foolish use of the one resource that will, eventually, disappear. As the psalm reminds us, most of us only get about seventy or so years in the first place, and much of that is spent groaning about our own lives. We would be doing everyone around us a favor if we put down our phones on occasion and enjoyed the lives right in front of us.

Father's Day, 25

 

Like many folks during the chaos of 2020, we bought a swimming pool. As discussed in a previous column, (May, 2020) this pool was big enough to be a burden but not big enough to actually swim in. It was also big enough to need a level spot in our yard but ugly enough I wanted to hide it. Therefore we (and by “we” I mean “I”) tried to put it up in an area of our backyard where only the very next-door-of-neighbors would ever have to see it. Unfortunately, this spot was not level enough, and so, after hours of effort, we (and by “we” I mean “my wife”) insisted we stop the madness and ask my dad for help.

He came over the next day with some surveying equipment and before long we had found the flattest area in the yard. We staked it out and went back inside. The next day, the pool was moved to its new home and filled with level water, and the summer was saved.

The next summer arrived, and it came time to fill up the pool again. Dad was gone by then, though, but the place he had measured for us was still very obvious. We set up the pool in the right spot, filled it up, and, once again, “enjoyed” the fun that only a giant inflatable pool can bring.

Although the summers have passed and that inflatable pool has been replaced by a simpler one, each season we know where the pool is supposed to go thanks to dad’s good measure.

Happy Father’s Day, dad, and thank you for showing us the right place.

Spoiled

 

My kids hurt my feelings all the time, but no more so when they accuse me of trying to poison them with rotten food. I don’t. However, in an effort to be thrifty, I do sometimes serve them delicious meals with mature ingredients. Apparently I’ve done this enough times to where they now have the audacity to question my cooking.

“Is this food rotten?” one of them will ask.

“It’s not rotten.” I will respond, my heart broken. “I would never serve you rotten food. That’s disgusting.”

Unconvinced, they will then rummage in the trash like a night beast. “Bro! The package on these little weenies says the due date was, like, five days ago!”

“But that doesn’t mean they’re rotten! I’ve told you this before, eating food after the ‘sell-by’ date is not the same thing as eating spoiled food.”

“I’m not eating this. This is poison.”

“It’s not that poisonous - the preservatives, yes, those might be toxic at high temperatures - but I would never feed you actually rotten food!”

And I wouldn’t, and, as any retired grocer will tell you, the “sell-by” dates are not some magic day when food suddenly becomes toxic. As Jerry Seinfeld famously taught us in one of his early jokes, it’s not as if the cows all get together and decide when the milk is going to spoil. In fact, despite living in a country with all kinds of rules governing all kinds of human behavior, outside of baby formula, there are no federal regulations concerning food freshness. Thus, milk that is taken off the shelves in one state and deemed unsuitable to drink might stay on shelves for days later in a less bougie state where people have more respect for hard working cows.

The reality is, if you’re wondering if the milk is spoiled or if the meat is rotten or if you should eat questionable food, use your senses and make a logical decision based on human reasoning. Smell it. Does it make you want to throw up? If it does, don’t eat it. Under most circumstances, your body is not going to allow you to poison itself.

Thus, we arrive finally (and mercifully) to the actual point of this questionable column: we must rely once again on our God-given reason to make sense of this world, and that’s because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not.

As just one fiery example out of thousands, during the Los Angeles disaster earlier this year, fake pictures were shared on social media of the Hollywood sign on fire. Except that it wasn’t. And while this may seem like a harmless hoax, when such a picture is shared and then re-shared exponentially in real time, it’s potentially dangerous because some real humans were trying to move away from the real fires while other real humans were trying to find the real fires and stop them.

The last thing any of them needed was cruel nonsense guised as wit.

And even while the fires were still spreading, we were inundated with insane origin stories, from space lasers to diabolical social engineering. Los Angeles, though, is technically a desert. Considering the dry conditions, high winds, and densely populated residential areas - many of them with very little in the way of fire mitigation - such a disaster, (whether it was arson, accident, or combination of both) is entirely within the realm of reason.

What is not reasonable, unfortunately, is relying entirely on what we see and hear in the mass media to make sense of the world. Now, because of the advent of A.I. enhanced “deep fake” technology - video and audio recording - once considered the gold standard to determine the objective reality of something, must also be consumed with skepticism.

Granted, we’ve always been given an edited version of reality. (Even a neighbor offering a firsthand account of a traffic accident will choose which details to highlight, omit, and embellish.) Up until a few years ago, however, we could at least say, “Well, unless I see it with my own eyes or hear it with my own ears, I won’t believe it.” Now, though, you can do both and still need to question what happened.

It is unsettling, but it’s not hopeless.  However, it will require us to pause and use the human reason we’ve been given. It will require us to “smell the news,” so to speak - regardless of where it comes from - before chugging from the jug.

First and foremost, we need to be honest with ourselves as it pertains to our own biases, and how those biases influence our perception of reality. Everyone is biased; it’s hardwired into the system. When it comes to processing information, however, our biases often get in the way of reasoned evaluation.

Secondly, when processing information, whether it’s from a major television network or a podcast uploaded from down the street, ask yourself, “Does this even make sense? Does this information jive with what I know about human history, human nature, and the basic laws of physics?” This is why - despite some belief to the contrary - having a well-educated public is crucial to the health of a democracy.

Finally - and this is the same thing I tell my students - we must check our sources, and yes, we should have multiple sources. I realize everyone has their favorite little niche where they get most of their news, but not all media outlets are created equal, and getting news from social media is like finding a prom date based on the vulgarities scrawled on a restroom stall. It’s a bad idea.

In closing, I would never feed my kids rotten food…on purpose. However, those serving up the media we’re ingesting don’t always have the same scruples. Choose wisely.

The Lantern

When we first moved into our home in the spring of 2010, the lamppost in our front yard  glowed at night. Soon it stopped, though, regardless of how often we changed the light bulb, and since I’m no electrician, that was that. It remained in our front yard, often crooked, seemingly useless…

Or so I thought.

Earlier this month - on the twelfth day of Christmas - it snowed. 

Then, in the morning hours of Epiphany - January 6th - it snowed again.

And in the snow, particularly with lumpy flakes bumping into each other on their way to earth, I couldn’t help but be reminded of another snowy lamppost that stands prominent in a “children’s book” written by a certain British author.

The lamppost in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series - first introduced to us in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, - is something of an anachronism. It seems out of place, glowing softly in a snowy medieval forest full of fauns, dwarves, and other talking beasts. We later learn the lamppost was propagated to Narnia from London, an accidental magic trick born out of a struggle between a wicked witch and a magician’s nephew.

For many years I thought about having the lamppost removed. I found it an eyesore, useless, an annoyance to mow around each summer. This winter, though, at the end of the Christmas season, surrounded by snow, I saw it as something different. The lamppost became a totem, a reminder of the beginning of our life here in this home.

In fact, the lamppost became a quiet symbol of childhood itself, because when we first moved into this house, our first born was just a toddler. A year later she was joined by her baby brother, and together the two of them grew up in a childhood full of pirate adventures, ferris wheel rides, and breezy holidays at the beach. Years later, during the Christmas season of 2015, they were joined by their sister, and although she struggled mightily during her first years of life, thanks to the bravery and kindness of a dear family friend, she, too, was given the gift of a childhood.

But now, even more years later, it’s 2025, and it often seems that childhood itself has been buried beneath the busyness of our calendar and the cacophony of our gadgets. When it snowed, though, all three of them laughed together and played again like children, in a silly little Narnia of their own, if only for a little while.

And so I think the lamppost will stay. It does look best in the snow, but it’s a reminder - in all seasons - to take time to play and to imagine, to be brave and look toward the Lion.