Making Space and Filling Time

Getting intentional about...well, everything

Here’s the Part 2 to go along with last week’s reflection, Teach ‘Em Whatcha Know. In it, I discuss the mistake I made of not passing a language on to my daughter and reflect on the little ways we remove ourselves from the task of passing on our skills — even the unmastered ones! — to our children. If we don’t, we risk sending off “nows” that return as “laters” pregnant with grief and regret. And the “laters” won’t always be ours: they are the inheritance of future generations.

So… what now?

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Monastery of Santa María la Real, Plaza Santa María, Nájera, Spain, Unsplash

Now is the time to get intentional: about play, about chores, about learning, about rest and parties and holidays and holy days.

I think if there’s one thing I’m realizing in my current season, a season full of new beginnings across the varied domains of my one life, it’s that nothing good, nothing of worth, happens by accident. Cultivation — ordering creation — is the most basic and characteristic human act. Any potential good that is catalyzed by accident can only become actually good on purpose by sustained human labor.

Intention must lead on to attention.

Some Changes

In a world where everyone is vying for your precious faculty of attention, it’s difficult to keep hold of it so that you can place it on the object you prefer. I’m embarrassed to share my iPhone’s weekly Screen Usage report with you. I have a couple different ways I could justify it — Spotify isn’t “screen time” and neither is navigation, YouTube when I’m studying how to grow potatoes, or a number of other things — but there is a huge amount of my average per day screen time that is nothing short of pure, mindless viewing/scrolling. My daughters only just got tablets a few months ago and while we’ve been fairly mindful about how much time they spend on them, something my wife and I can monitor from our phones, it’s still easy to pawn off family time or boredom, or create space around raw emotions, or alleviate any number of other uncomfy situations by simply handing them the tech and sending them away. The temptation to do so is shockingly strong.

I’ve been thinking about changes of the humanizing sort for a while. It’s where the foray into gardening and chickens came from. It’s the reason for my emphasis on the internally formative power of manual labor. And while I’m thankful for my own growth, I don’t want to be stingy: I want my family to resist the societal tides that draw them into a machine-patterned existence, and I want them to engage in the practices that preserve and perfect their humanity. I returned from the FPR Conference (read about my experience here) resolved to take the necessary steps I had already been considering.

This is something

Ruth Gaskovski

,

Peco

,

Paul Kingsnorth

, and others have championed and written much on in recent months and years. Kingsnorth has written persuasively on a way of existing that society at large has, like Johnny Cash, built once piece at a time. In this way, efficiency is prized over care, agency is reduced to consumptive choice, the sacred, transcendent source of meaning (however one might define it) has been abandoned, both nature and humanity are being remade according to a better design, and Everywhere At Once is better than Here. Systems, structures, tools, toys, entertainment- they all, in their own unique ways, form us into the image of this society, to make us fit for what he calls The Machine.

In their recent essay The 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval, Ruth Gaskovski and Peco chart a helpful path forward that is wide enough to allow for many paths leading away from the Machine and towards being human but narrow enough to be practical. I encourage you to read the essay for yourself if you haven’t, but to simply list the Rs: Recognize, Remove, Return. It’s a simple enough formula that covers a lot of ground. Once you intend to leave, then begins the hard work of attending to all the ways, large and small, that the things in your life are deforming your humanity. Many times it isn’t the things themselves, but the way in which you use them. Other times, things invite particular use that necessarily require a Machine mindset.

The Amish often get pointed to as a people who have resisted Machine existence, but, since I am an oblate of St. Benedict, I’d like to invoke another community to consider as a model for re-patterning our lives: the monastics. I’ve been on retreat a number of times to a local Cistercian monastery (the Cistercian Order is in the Benedictine tradition) and it has struck me that the kind of way in which one lives as a monk is so entirely different from the way that we live in the world.

“Duh, Nate, you absolute walnut.”

Okay, listen. I’m not talking about the fact that they pray. I’m not referring to their habits (clothes) or their habits (settled ways of behavior). I’m not referring to their chanting. I’m not referring to the monastery architecture. I’m not even referring to the fact that they are Christian. I’m referring to their aim: perfect presence. Everything in the monastery, their space and their schedule, is conducive to thick, rich — and somehow, paradoxically, transcendent — presence. The monk’s interiority is such that they are trained to have their attention in perfect possession so that they can place it fully on their object of choice. God.

And if I think about it long enough, it actually seems to be the case that the precision with which the monks structure the space and time they move through is not so dissimilar from the Machine. A difference that might be noticed is that the monastery is forming individuals who are capable of focusing their attention, their entire being, on One object; the Machine deforms individuals by atomizing the many facets of their being and drawing them in as many separate directions as possible. So how am I suggesting that they are similar? The monastery and the Machine have different aims, but, at a high level, they both shape space and time and place in them tools and activities that form participants toward their respective ends.

There’s a prayer I pray when I leave my house for work every morning. As I step over the threshold of my garage door onto my driveway, I make the sign of the cross and say,

I renounce Satan and all his pride and all his service, and I unite myself to Thee, O Christ, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Notice the assumption in the prayer: what I am stepping out into is fundamentally different from what I leave behind. Out there is Satan and his way of being, serving him through my actions and conforming my interior life to his - prideful, vainglorious, malicious, and all the rest. But when I’m home? The prayer doesn’t say explicitly. I assume that if Satan’s domain is what I’m exiting my home to wander through, then not Satan’s domain is what exists in my home.

That is a very bold assumption on the prayer’s part. But it doesn’t need to be.

Here are some of the measures my family is taking to be intentional about our space and our time so that what happens in the home is conducive to our humanity.

Making Space and Filling Time

“What are we going to do if we can’t have our tablets in the living room anymore?”

That was my older daughter’s question as we sat at the kitchen table as a family, discussing the changes we’d be making in our family. And you know what? At the start of our discussion, I didn’t have a great response. I didn’t have a massive, detailed list of dictates to hand down as local authoritarian. Rather, I wanted us to imagine together what The Good Life might look like together.

Tech Time

We have made the decision that when we are in common spaces in our home, spaces like the living room, the kitchen, or the sun room, we will not be on our handheld supercomputer entertainment devices. If these bits of technology are going to be used in an entertainment capacity, they are restricted to bedrooms or the office. Want to spend time researching an author or tatting lace or how to get the chickens to sit on command? That’s different. Total entertainment-oriented tech time, which we are calling Tech Time, is restricted to 10 hours in a week, or 1.5 hours max per day. Research tech time will be regulated as the situation sees fit.

And the TV? We aren’t ripping it off the living room wall. We aren’t cancelling our various streaming services. Watching certain shows and movies as a family is a joy for us. We love spending time together in that way. So that will remain as a family option, but we have committed ourselves to ONLY using it in that case. If an individual wants to watch something on their own, that gets deducted from their daily/weekly tech time.

So, to answer my daughter’s question, what exactly are we going to do if we aren’t on our tables or in front of the TV?

Tidy Time

On the less fun side of things, there are always chores. Each of us have thirty minutes per day of Tidy Time: no more, and only less if you end a task at 28 minutes and can’t reasonably start or finish another. Why no more? Because I want us to habituate the idea that it’s okay for the work to end. Why no less (with the exception of my caveat)? Because I want us to habituate that we have a responsibility daily to upholding the peace and cleanliness and orderliness of the home we all share, and while I don’t want that responsibility exhausting us, neither do I want the house to become exhausting because of its disorderly state.

The Rest of the Time

On a more fun note, I asked everyone to think about something they’d like to learn. My wife quipped, “I wouldn’t like to learn anything.” Ha! Okay, fair. “Try to think back to the last time you thought or said to yourself, ‘Man, it would be nice if I knew <blank>.’ What was that? What are those things? Or how about, ‘What is a thing I would like to be able to do in the future? What resources, knowledge, or skills would be required for me to be able to do that thing?’” That got the juices flowing and the lists growing.

We split the responses by individual — my own list, my wife’s, and each of my two daughters — and then we made a family list. What are things that we’d like to do together? My wife and I decided that it’s time to get serious about making time to study the catechism and Scripture as a family. Our daughters felt that going on family walks was not only important, but enjoyable. We decided that having a once-monthly Open House would be fun: an open invitation for any of our friends, neighbors, or family to simply roll in unannounced and enjoy snacks, refreshments, lounging around, or lending a hand with whatever else is going on. Scheduled but flexible. Relatedly, we want to get serious about planning for and celebrating saints’ days and the liturgical seasons of the church, which requires some research, often involves what we will be eating (and, therefore, ingredients we’ll be buying from the grocery store and recipes we’ll be cooking), and even can include the décor in our home.

Conclusion

In short, we’ve begun tinkering with the physical and temporal space we inhabit such that it becomes capacious for human activity, and then filling that space and time with the kinds of things that bring us together, increase our individual agency, and require us to lean on one another in various ways.

This isn’t a zero-sum endeavor. Since the family conversation, our holding to this plan has been hit-or-miss, and you know what? That’s okay. We’re working against the forces of nature (our own habits and all that’s wrapped up in them) and of culture. In my case, it’s been 33 years of treating the homes I’ve lived in in particular ways without a second thought. We’re up against a massive external pressure in the Machine, and even more massive internal pressures as the Machine has colonized and made itself integral to our interior lives. In the end, we aren’t monks. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take the monastic design principle and apply it to our home.

At the end of my life, I may not have much in the way of worldly goods to leave my children, but I hope I can leave them things of surpassing value: skills, roots, worship, virtue. A lifetime of memories living and learning and living some more.

The intention is there. Now, if I am wise, I will attend.