8/12/2023 0 Comments Slack tide matt labash![]() There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And so we go from bad to worse, exhaust ourselves, empty our whole life of all content, and fall into despair. When our activity is habitually disordered, our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the *quantity* of our acts, without perfecting their quality. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half lived exhausts and depletes our being. Everything depends on the *quality* of our acts and our experiences. Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity or experience as such. Labash goes on to quote an essay by the Canadian artist and novelist Douglas Coupland entitled “Why the Nineties Rocked,” which is “partly about how different life looked in the last days before we had constant noise in our ear.”Īnd then he quotes the 20th century monk Thomas Merton (his italics, my bolds): Letting our minds sit still, instead of wandering around in our pathology-driven media hellscape. But one thing we seem to have no appetite for is being bored even for a second. We like at least two of everything, and supersized. There is not much our society won’t ingest these days. I miss what it feels like to not be overstimulated or provoked or moved to outrage, which we are constantly prompted to be. For the last decade or so, we’ve been too over-excited, over-provoked, and overstimulated. Or rather, I craved boredom, finding all the excitement dull in a not-this-sh*t-show-again sort of way. ![]() He begins with an account of himself watching President Biden’s state of the union address, with all of the accusations and heckling, the drama and the outrage.Īnd yet, even with all the excitement, I couldn’t sustain any. ![]() His family wasn’t Lutheran though, but he identifies, as they say, as an evangelical Christian.) (He is, in fact, a graduate of Mount Olive Lutheran School in San Antonio. Labash writes about politics, culture, and even religion from a mostly conservative and mostly humorous point of view. So, as an apologist for boredom who has inflicted that virtue on my children and who, as a professor, gave that gift to countless students, thereby extending their lives, I was glad to come across a piece by Matt Labash entitled Overstimulation Nation: How embracing boredom could help us. All of this worked better than washing their mouths out with soap.) If I heard any of them say “fair,” as in “That’s not fair!”, I would punish them with a lecture on the nature of justice, whereupon they had to prove the injustice in their complaint. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |