Lessons Learned…
Time 3
Twenty
four hours. This is an unchanging, unbending, unrecoverable daily allotment of
time given to each of us as we awaken each day, and its expenditure is fully at
the mercy of our choice-making. Certain
activities need to consume certain amounts of our time; eating, sleeping,
attending school or going to work, walking the dog, brushing teeth, filling the
car with gas, and so on, but there remains a good deal of negotiable time
available for extraneous choices. How do you choose? Or is it easier not to
choose, not to be deliberate, and instead allow the minutes and hours to
fritter away, unapologetically in the daily complacency of extreme over-stimulation
due to bombardment of busy-ness, infiltration of obsessive amounts of
technology, and infinite choices? So we throw on our headphones and retreat to
our screens where there is peace in isolation albeit unstoppable loneliness. As a teacher, I hear a great deal about screen
time as the time choice of choice. My
concern is that our children, our students, and we ourselves are abandoning our
desperate longing for connection, relationship, and community in exchange for
something much, much less. We are too
tired for the effort of connection, for it does require a sacrificial exertion
of self to become engaged in any relational process. And although we need it more than anything,
we run from it because it demands and life simply already demands too much all
day long. Twenty four hours. It’s the same
twenty four hours that our parents, and their parents, and generations upon
generations upon generations of parents have had, because it never changes. The
problem is, I am not sure that we are getting this right. We hurry and scurry
frenetically filling our minutes and
hours with all they can possibly contain and then a bit more only to find
ourselves in a puddle of ill-tempered exhaustion at the end of the day,
preparing to buck up for tomorrow’s agenda of the same merry-go-round
ride. Jumping off the merry-go-round to
enjoy a good book with your children in the shade of a backyard tree seems
somehow robbed of its peace and pleasure by the burdensome guilt of jumping off
what everyone else is managing to stay on. Somehow I know that we know the
error of our ways with regards to our time and our choices, yet we remain
willingly paralyzed and incompetent in our truthful effort to seek relational
strength and balance with our time. Our
twenty four hours are, ever so graciously, new every day and in honor of this
gift we must choose to be deliberate and teach our little ones to be
deliberate, investing wisely in each other and experiencing the subsequent
contentment. To be continued…
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