spiritual practices

Thus Saith the Lord, Slow Thyself Down

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

I committed two highly avoidable (and highly costly, for a working family) blunders in the last six months.

However, my frustration did not reach its fever pitch until yesterday. I arrived late for my morning class because: a. I encountered snarls of traffic after dropping the girls off at school and b. I then still took the time to pick up some miscellaneous hardware at the local Screwfix. In my frenzy, I wretchedly parked on a double yellow line, a fact I was not fully cognizant of until I got out of class three hours later, whereupon I found a menacing yellow clamp on my front driver’s side tyre.

After paying the 60-euro fine, I had to wait nearly two hours for ‘yer man’ to come de-clamp me, by which time I was twenty minutes late for my afternoon class on another campus. My English language students were patiently waiting and greeted me with pleasant smiles. I gave them an impromptu lesson on the words clamp, de-clamp, and government overreach.

That was actually the final lapse of judgment in a series of three. I haven’t even told you about the first two:

  1. I hastily put some kind of inferior, off-road fuel into our brand-new lawnmower. Obviously, I was trying to save money, but I had to pay 60 euros to have the fuel lines drained. Just like the de-clamp: 60 euros. That must be my default stupid tax.
  2. Then, the other day in the final lap of the final mowing of the season, I was mowing too close to the conservatory window, which caused a stone to ricochet up and shatter a significant portion of the same.

Esther says it only goes to show I’m not really a fully-functional adult but only posing as one. Actually, what she said was, “This means you are spinning so many plates that a few of them have to shatter.” I said, “Thank you, dear wife, that’s a very charitable reading of the situation.”

But I also think I have absorbed the lie that I am infallible and infinite. The reality is that I am profoundly limited. My plan for the next few years is to earn and learn (finishing a degree in English and Religious Studies, yay!). Moreover, I am trying to pour my attention into my daughters before they cross the Rubicon into adolescence, not that I expect all communication to be cut off at that point, just that it might become more complicated. All these endeavors require serious energy and time and I don’t have much left over.

At any rate, last evening as I did the examen*, the Lord said, slow the ____ down! John Mark Comer, citing Dallas Willard, said that the only spiritual advice we really need to follow is, “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry.” I try to take that onboard, more because Willard said it than Comer. Somehow, he comes across as superficial, but I know that’s a harsh evaluation. At any rate, I did read Comer’s book on ruthlessly eliminating hurry–albeit on 1.45 speed!.

Several specific actions I could take to train me to slow down:

  1. Set the timer for one minute and do nothing.
  2. Ride out the impulse for checking my phone. Time how long the impulse lasts. Work on building the concentration muscle.
  3. Say out loud several things that could go wrong in any given situation. It sounds stressful, but I think it might help me close the loop between what my subconscious is trying to tell me and the realm of the fully conscious.

* No, I don’t have elite spiritual practices, the examen is just something I stumbled across through an odd sequence of events, i.e., reading the above-mentioned J.M. Comer, as well as his holiness, the Bishop of Waterford, recommending it. It really does work. Surprise, surprise, right? It’s not like it hasn’t been around for 5 centuries.

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The other morning I read a news headline out loud as we ate breakfast: “There were three executions in the US in the last week.”

My 10-year-old daughter’s instinctive response: “How are the bad guys ever going to learn if the government kills them?”

My 7-year-old daughter’s equally fast rejoinder: “Yeah, and don’t cops know the murders have a bad mental illness!”

I smiled paternally but could not help agreeing. The catalogue of explanations for their responses surely includes the following:

  1. They are speaking from the God-given sense of right and wrong.
  2. Their parents indoctrinated them;
  3. They have lived in western Europe for too long.

Sorry for all the lists in this post.

You Can’t Force Creativity But You Can Show up for It

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Yesterday on my afternoon run I was listening to Krista Tippett interview Rick Rubin who is a musician and a self-identified creative. Imagine going around introducing yourself as a creative. So what do you do? I’m a creative. It certainly beats all the bullshit jobs you hear about these days, like: “I synthesize data analysis to foster greater engagement among key stakeholders.” Really? And that’s how you plan to spend your one wild and precious life?

Anyway, Rick Rubin likens the creative process to fishing. You can never guarantee that you are going to catch fish, no matter how often you go fishing, but it is equally true that you will never catch fish if you don’t go fishing. And you should never think of your failure to catch fish as actual failures, but rather as eliminating a dead-end. If you fail 10 times, you have eliminated 10 dead-ends, assuming of course, and this is crucial, that you fail in a different ways.

It ties in with the documentary I watched about Stockton Rush, the guy who was hellbent to plunge a carbon-fibre submarine almost 4 kilometres into the abyss–with a crew of 5–to view the moldering wreck that is the Titanic. He kept testing the submarine and I think he built several iterations of it, but he never fundamentally changed his approach. They say he was averse to any form of criticism. Unfortunately, his creation imploded several hundred metres before they reached the Titanic. The loss of life was catastrophic but at least it was instantaneous.

So the trick is, whether you’re building submarines or learning to write, to 1) to find new ways to fail and 2) keep showing up to fish. I remember that I had a pretty good run a few years of doing “morning pages,” a method Julia Cameron came up with and wrote about in her book called The Artist’s Way. I must pick that book up again, actually. I think I could re-incorporate it into my routine spiritual practices.

Recently, I have discovered great freedom and joy in playing around with my spiritual practices. For so long, I had this humourless view of spiritual practices, that they have to look a certain way. I still do feel that there should be a daily reading of one’s sacred texts (in my case the Bible, usually one of the Psalms and sometimes one other passage), and some form of prayer. But it occurred to me that we have so much freedom in how we carry that out. For instance, I find it’s better to have short prayers but to have them more frequently, perhaps 3 or 5 times a day.

The constant stimulation available in the Digital Age has been a barrier for my creative process. We now have vast, perhaps unprecedented access to creative works, and from an unprecedented number of creators, or at least creators who are sharing their work. I suppose humans have always created, it’s just that a larger number are making it public. Now there’s so much creative work to take in that I seldom stop to try to put something out.

It’s interesting to think about the creative process as the domain of the right brain. I’m working my way through Iain McGilchrist’s book on that subject called The Master and His Emissary. Most of the advances we’re seeing in AI are in the domain of the left brain, the subservient emissary. One thing AI can’t touch is humans who create, because we’re in right brain mode. No matter how stunning AI is, it’s doing mostly or entirely left-brain tasks.

Left-brain activity can impress us, but only the more creative, right-brain activity can transform us and inspire worship. Let’s not neglect it.