detangling life (pt.1)
If you want to live more simply, you can be sure that it is not going to be simple to learn how to live that way.
Life in our culture holds great challenge for anyone who wants to live a simple, or integrated life. The massive change and complexity of life we experience bring significantly higher levels of stress, anxiety, and frustration, while producing an ever decreasing creativity, thoughtfulness, and connectedness. We are heading for a burnout, and some of us are already there.
This is not life as God intended it to be. Many people today (myself included) live lives that are a tangled mess of obligations, expectations, over-commitments, aspirations, and convictions. All these things pull us in different directions and the result is the radical fragmentation of life. We have little pieces of a life spread out all over the place, but there is no whole—no integrated self. The ways of coping with this fragmentation vary from denial and escape (escape into media, alcohol, or work), to control disorders and violence (attempts to keep from feeling powerless). These coping strategies, however, are recipes for disaster—a disaster that is being played out in our homes, schools, and in the workplace.
One step toward bringing health and wholeness (the kind of life God intends for us to live) is to simplify life—-to step out of the frantic pace and fragmentation of the culture around us. This is not easy to do. We have decades of formation to unlearn, not to mention the weight of social pressure to conform (from advertising, peer groups, and inner insecurities). It is a complex endeavor to detangle the tangled mess of modern life, but it is one that we must undertake—-for our sake and for the sake of the world.
Life in our culture holds great challenge for anyone who wants to live a simple, or integrated life. The massive change and complexity of life we experience bring significantly higher levels of stress, anxiety, and frustration, while producing an ever decreasing creativity, thoughtfulness, and connectedness. We are heading for a burnout, and some of us are already there.
This is not life as God intended it to be. Many people today (myself included) live lives that are a tangled mess of obligations, expectations, over-commitments, aspirations, and convictions. All these things pull us in different directions and the result is the radical fragmentation of life. We have little pieces of a life spread out all over the place, but there is no whole—no integrated self. The ways of coping with this fragmentation vary from denial and escape (escape into media, alcohol, or work), to control disorders and violence (attempts to keep from feeling powerless). These coping strategies, however, are recipes for disaster—a disaster that is being played out in our homes, schools, and in the workplace.
One step toward bringing health and wholeness (the kind of life God intends for us to live) is to simplify life—-to step out of the frantic pace and fragmentation of the culture around us. This is not easy to do. We have decades of formation to unlearn, not to mention the weight of social pressure to conform (from advertising, peer groups, and inner insecurities). It is a complex endeavor to detangle the tangled mess of modern life, but it is one that we must undertake—-for our sake and for the sake of the world.
posted by joel at 5:52 AM
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