"... 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.