Apologies for the sparse updating frequency. Oftentimes in the day-to-day it becomes kind of difficult to pick out what may be of interest to really mention in a blog post, and the majority of my daily American life does not feel nearly as interesting and novel as my daily Guinean life. In any case, the year has turned over and there is a lot of end-of-year reflections and new-year projections, so from some of this thinking I felt like I ought to sit down and hash some of it out myself.
20/20
There’s a lot of ways to describe the last year, and I think most everyone you meet will agree that 2020 has been a difficult year. Looking back on a year that has been absolutely brimming with [long list of negative adjectives here]. It has brought the worst out of some people and subsequently the best out of others. I’ve seen so much outpouring of support even when we were in the midst of difficulties and struggles. Learning to both give help and receive it graciously.
In 2020 20/20 hindsight (p.Sam will surely be proud of this one), I think it was a huge wake up call for a lot of people. The world has grown stagnant in its compassion and caring. Suddenly realizing that there is no such thing as self-sufficiency and everyone is dependent on each other, though obvious, came barreling in as a surprise. It made people uncomfortable. As my friend Jessica likes to say, both “you have to learn to embrace that tension” and more famously, “it’s a process.” For that hardship and trial, I am grateful. I think I (and probably lots of people) often wished for something dramatic to happen in my otherwise ordinary life, and well, it happened. To everybody, just about.
So many things are lost to 2020. From something as small as being able to go to the pottery studio to the hundreds of thousands of precious lives lost in the pandemic, the cost is greater than any of us probably imagined in January 2020. That cost is sunk, but we can decide how to move forward.
2021
The title of this post comes from a “vision” — a term I’m getting more comfortable using for relating certain impactful dreams that feel like they have spiritual lessons or implications — that I had back when I was on the ship. You can read the full recounting of the vision on my post titled selah (about 75% of the way down), but it ties back into the April 16 Oswald Chambers entry “Can You Come Down from the Mountain?” with the key take away: We must learn to live in the ordinary “gray” day according to what we saw on the mountain. The point being we often look back to the past “highs” and wish that we could always be in that most amazing moment. Instead of sitting here wishing we could be back in the “good old days,” we ought to live our ordinary, not-so-interesting “gray” days according to what we saw in those highs.
I’ve encountered many times in my life where I wished something was, “the way it used to be.” I wished for life before a pandemic shut a lot of things down. I wished for the time when I was living closer to my community in Chapel Hill. I wished for relationships to regress rather than grow. It’s been really interesting how aware I’ve become of these rose-tinted lenses.
I guess the point is that things will never truly “go back to the way they were” prior to the pandemic. Events like this change the world forever, for better and for worse, similar to the way 9/11 changed American air travel forever. I’m sure the world will find a new normal, even after the pandemic becomes part of the history books.
In letter 15 of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (pasted below), the demon Screwtape is writing to a junior demon how to appropriately distract his patient (the human it has been charged with leading astray) into dwelling on the past or concerning himself in the future rather than the eternity of the present. The context of the letter at the time was World War II, another event that led to the tragic loss of human life and changed the world forever. Despite this being written decades ago, replace “the war” with “the pandemic” and it stays eerily relevant. I think this kind of thinking was particularly apparent this year, people both wishing that things would be the way they were before the pandemic, as well as making plans and concerning ourselves with a future we don’t control. There are things lost that will not come back. I’ve spent a year biding my time–waiting “until the pandemic is over” to continue living my life when really I let the time slip by waiting for a future that didn’t arrive. I may not have the same avenues to maintain a healthy mental and physical life, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible. I still have to make the effort to get up and make time for service and fellowship. I bought Ring Fit Adventure (an exercise game for Nintendo Switch) to keep active since the likelihood of me joining a Masters swim team is now even smaller than it was before. I picked up knitting and crocheting since I can’t go to the studio at the moment. I can still floss every day (okay well… I could have done this even before the pandemic, but I added it to the list of positive habits to form).
The ordinary “gray” day is something I’m learning to actively pursue. I can make decisions to live according to the life I experienced on the mountain–it just might take a little creativity in a special time. I’m hoping that this year I can look towards the gray–ordinary, yet eternal present that God wants me to concern myself with.
—Jasmin
Letter 15
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I had noticed, of course, that the humans were having a lull in their European war—what they naively call “The War”!—and am not surprised that there is a corresponding lull in the patient’s anxieties. Do we want to encourage this, or to keep him worried? Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind. Our choice between them raises important questions.
The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.
Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. . . It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.
To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.
It follows then, in general, and other things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn’t much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the present. But the phrase “living in the present”is ambiguous. It may describe a process which is really just as much concerned with the Future as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is, going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. Here again, our Philological Arm has done good work; try the word “complacency” on him. But, of course, it is most likely that he is “living in the Present” for none of these reasons but simply because his health is good and he is enjoying his work. The phenomenon would then be merely natural. All the same, I should break it up if I were you. No natural phenomenon is really in our favour. And anyway, why should the creature be happy?
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis