Thanks to Richard Swenson’s book (above), the recent death of my i-phone and the fact that it’s December, a month that has the capacity to upend my calendar, complexity is on my mind.

Each day the world becomes more complicated. The automatic, default direction of progress is toward escalating complexity. Much of this trend is to our liking, for we delight in sophisticated, impressive hardware, whether space shuttles, supercomputers, artificial hearts, or global positioning satellites.

But there is another aspect to this story. Complexity can bless, but it also can irritate. And most of us do not need a larger irritation burden complicating our already overloaded lives. At such times we might consider strong, determined, selective moves to keep our lives, our schedules, and our technology within a range of acceptable complexity.

-Richard Swenson

It’s December, and Thursday is the kindergarten musical. Last Thursday was the 6th grade chorus concert. Saturday is the ballet recital that follows soccer practice and precedes the office Christmas party. A new work project just started. Life needs careful managing, and my new phone still lacks some “apps” to help me manage that life remotely. There’s a level of complexity to life and, in particular, life in December. On top of the events and the usual task lists, we all know there’s Christmas shopping and planning to do. Decorating. Cooking. Getting ready for company. The phone reminders are chiming hourly, an attempt to keep things from falling through the cracks, things that exceed my capacity to manage them. This is a month of noise and great expectations. And in the din of all that noise is a Christmas tree quietly reminding me there’s something more important going on than all these calendar items — if I could just slow down long enough to listen.

When the alarm sounds in the morning, I hit snooze. Ten more minutes of suspended time. It’s not because I have nothing to do in this month of December, this year of Decembers. It’s because I want to be quiet just a little bit longer, before the day begins to dictate my time instead of me. I feel guilty when I choose “snooze” over “off” because I reason that getting up an hour earlier would help me manage all this complexity better. But in reality, one hour is not enough to do that. No calendar or chart or phone reminder can completely manage the flurry of activity that is life in all its complexity. Trying is like herding cats. So I postpone the inevitable. Ten more minutes.

This morning I hit snooze 6 times. So when I did finally get out of bed it was to wake groggy little bodies to get ready for school. There wasn’t time to sit on the edge of the bed next to my seven year old, snuggled up in his fluffy blanket and wake him gently, enjoying the serenity of a child’s face at rest. Instead I had to rush him. He needed to move quickly to be ready in time today. But it was really just me that needed to move quickly, and I drew my child from his world of sleepy wonder into mine, an adult world where schedules harass and efficiency reigns. If we were perfectly efficient, I reasoned, we could still make it to school in time. I put all the burden of my calendar on the shoulders of children and goaded them out the door, past that quiet, glistening Christmas tree that may have been whispering something if I’d had the time to listen. I was busy herding my cats and regretting the snare of the snooze button.

But snooze buttons can be more than a snare depending on how you look at them. As I stop to write this, as the room grows quiet around me, I am pushing my mid-day snooze button. I’m silencing the task list for a moment. Instead I’m taking ten minutes to think about the people behind the tasks, the names associated with the events on my calendar. I’m pushing snooze on all those lists so I can listen to the whispers of Christmas. And Christmas is whispering its gifts. Simple gifts. That snooze button can be a window too, letting the light of God’s love and grace shine on my December.

I love Richard Swenson’s book because in just a couple of minutes each day (the book is written as 180 daily “reflections”), I can be reminded that complexity comes at a price, and those moments when we put our gear into overdrive to get everything done are meant to be temporary. We shouldn’t live our lives in overdrive even though much of the time we do. My kids don’t live that way. When my kids get home from school today, after they finish the homework and we determine the school has had enough of them for the day, they’ll play. They’ll be building things, pretending things, laughing, joking.They’ll be whispering about Christmas with wistful grins. They’ll be waiting at the window for the neighbors to get home so they can pick up the play where they left off yesterday.

They have gears for rest and play and work. They don’t have to push a snooze button (though they may want to push mine).

I spent much of last weekend in airport terminals and on planes, traveling to and from Los Angeles. One of my travel buddies talked to the gate agent about changing our seats. The transaction went well, and my friend thanked her for being so helpful. “We try,” the gate agent answered. “We really do always try to make our customers happy. And when they’re cooperative and friendly about it, it makes a difference.”

Cooperation. Friendliness. Two traits that in tandem make a difference both for the travelers and the agents who have to deal with them. When an agent’s day can go like this, it makes a more pleasant day for everyone.

The converse is also true. One fowl attitude can ransack the whole travel experience. The woman in front of me on one plane was boasting about her behavior on her last flight. She was seated in front of a family with small children who were apparently kicking her seat. The woman said, “I had to give those parents a training lesson on how to parent. When I told them about managing their kids, the dad answered, ‘They’re just kids.’” She went on to describe her response to that. The next time her seat got kicked, she yelled and tossed part of her drink over the back of her seat on the family behind. “I figured,” she concluded, “that if they were going to make my flight miserable, I may as well make theirs miserable too.”

It’s hard to travel with kids. This I know well. It’s hard for kids to behave perfectly when their normal sleep and eating schedules are thrown off by travel. It’s hard for parents to parent perfectly when they’re tired too and just trying to survive the trip. And I’m even one who thinks that as a generation, we’re doing a pretty poor job of raising kids to be respectful, polite and self-disciplined!

Sometimes we parents give in to a kid’s demands knowing full well that it’s rewarding their bad behavior, reasoning it will get them to be quiet and not bother the lady in front of them. Yet I also know, as a parent (and not an awesome one at that), the job isn’t about getting kids to behave perfectly in public but about teaching them how. And there’s a difference. Trying to get kids to behave perfectly in public focuses only on the moment at hand and cares only about immediate results. But teaching kids means enduring the public humiliation of the moment and using it as yet another teaching opportunity. It’s looking at the long-term results, not the short-term gain.

This is the burden of parenting kids who must one day leave home and be constructive human beings. It’s not always easy. And when a feisty passenger in the seat in front of you tosses unsolicited criticism and soda at you and your family because your child is acting like a kid instead of a constructive adult, it’s spirit crushing. It’s demoralizing. And it just doesn’t help anyone.

But it’s like a salve on an open sore when an empathetic bystander takes the time to say, “Honey, I know it seems crazy now, but these days will pass. It’s hard work but keep it up. Don’t worry about what everyone else around you is thinking. You’re doing okay.”

The woman in front of me, boasting of her parent-training techniques, didn’t know what the gate agent knew. She didn’t trust that a family might be trying really hard to keep everyone happy. She failed to comprehend how an empathetic word could have bolstered that little family’s spirits and made the whole trip a whole lot more pleasant – for everyone. She failed to see the irony of her own childish behavior, throwing her soda at children to teach them a lesson.

For any time I saw a child whining or throwing a hissy fit in public and quietly judged the parents, I am so sorry. I hope to be an encourager. I hope to be cooperative and friendly, one who lifts a spirit instead of tearing one down. I hope to be the kind of person who behaves better than the myriad of grown-up children acting badly on airplanes, then boasting about it.

(And I’m climbing off my slippery little soapbox now.)

My i-phone started dying last week. Maybe I should have recognized its feeble cries for help, the apps that looked as though they were trying to open only to fade back to a confused menu screen. First it was Google. Then it was Instagram. Then Reader. One by one its apps were closing their eyes to me. Then two nights ago, with a newly charged battery coursing through its electronic veins, it powered itself down for good.

I’m mad at it. I think it should have warned me. If I’d known, I could have acted. I could have saved my family memories, my extensive notes, my account information and a list of all the apps which have become as much a part of my day as putting on clothes and eating. But it stole off into the night with everything, and some things just can’t be replaced.

It Draws You In

I can tell you the exact day I got hooked on that phone. I clearly remember saying, “I don’t need a fancy phone. I barely even use my phone. Half the time I don’t even remember to turn it on.” I didn’t want to be one of those junkies who was always distracted by her phone, by its enticing “notifications” and alerts. But friends had started to send me text messages, and it was costing me 60 cents a pop. Then one day, standing in the AT&T store with my husband as he purchased the i-phone 4, I took into my hands his handed-down 3, already a generation behind. “Don’t give me a big data plan. I won’t use it,” I said. But the universe may have shuddered at that. I may have felt the tremor in my soul. I may have realized then there was no turning back, even as I blurted out those useless words that would hold as much resolve as a spoonful of pudding.

It Seeps Into the Bones

I didn’t know then how this flat, glowing wonder would seep into the bones of my existence, how it would organize my life and my thoughts. I’d no idea then how it would become to me a source of endless information or how it would provide answers to an infinite list of questions. It would tell me in two minutes what was going on in the lives of hundreds of friends. It would give me pictures of my kids on bike rides with their dad. It would scan all my favorite news sources and blogs and synthesize them for me in a digestible portion. It would give me the freedom to blog while lying in a hammock next to the pool. It would eliminate the need for planning all kinds of things. I didn’t need to look at a map to find the best route for the next road trip because it could do that for me on the road. I no longer needed to remember anyone’s phone number because it did the remembering for me. I didn’t need to remember to charge up the camcorder or camera in preparation for the kids’ events because if I forgot, I always had my phone to do it for me. I could go out of town and still access and respond to important emails. I could basically run my life from anywhere — the car, the store or the hammock.

It Changes Your Life

Basically it changed the way I live my life, for better or for worse. I know that because I have been a chaotic, anxious, disorganized wreck since Sunday night when my attempts to resuscitate it failed. I feel like I go through the day with one hand tied behind my back. It is as though I’ve lost a limb. And when the store wouldn’t replace it with another i-phone for lack of stock, when they talked me into something else, I came home with an unfamiliar and clunky thing. I hate it. I hate it for making me think, putting me through hoops to try and find what I want. I hate that I have to teach it everything that my old phone knew without being told. I hate that its ring is annoying and that it will take me time to find its settings because they’re buried under a poorly designed interface that taunts me to find anything. It’s a harassment.

I’m annoyed, and I’m getting nothing done. So since I have to work to re-train this big, black ugly phone while the stacks of things to do continue to pile, why not blog and whine to you? Because not only am I annoyed with the new phone, I regret the way I let the old one worm its way into my life so indelibly that I can’t seem to function without it. And I’m ashamed that in the midst of so many more important people and events in my life, I’m spending my energy on something my grandmother would have viewed as a luxurious annoyance, an obstacle to getting work done. I guess I can see her point. But I want my i-phone hit and BAD. I’m a junkie after all.

On the fumes of the night, I found a blog. And on the first hit, I was hooked. Sentences swung back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. Time faded. And a blog I did devour. It was heaven, and I remembered something about good writing. A good writer makes me want to write. Her art is in letters, in making them into story. A good writer is not afraid to look bad to her audience. She doesn’t take herself too seriously. And she writes her life, however sad or comic or seemingly insignificant, through a lens of redemption and grace.

As I reflect on my favorite writers, the ones I most admire, the ones who most inspire me, I realize something else. The writer writes to fail just as much as to succeed. It is the risk she absorbs every time she sits to write. In writing she merges her pain with her bliss and welcomes her reader to a momentary world where he can make sense of his own. Oh, and we love her, love her so much we steal from her. We’ll take her thoughts and re-word them into the sentence of our own life until they become ours as much as they were ever hers.

It is good to remember why I write. I write because I enjoy it. Sometimes I’m inspired by an unexpected emotion or thought, but almost always it is words themselves that lure me out onto the ice of empty page. They have great power over me, both to buoy me and to draw out from me a story that, though mine, has a benefactor in many. I cannot write without the muse of other writers. They are “qualified” because they write. They write to me. And my qualifications are: that I write too.

Tonight I remind myself that inspiration is not far. I make myself remember. Because morning will come, and in my bleary, caffeine-starved struggle to rouse, I won’t be so verbal, won’t remember where to find my muse. The spell will have broken. Letters will scatter on a blank page. And new work will have to be done to create a coherent story.

“I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us.” That’s how the film Platoon, a commentary on U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, ends in the words of protagonist Chris Taylor (played by Charlie Sheen). The words seem appropriate today as I read that little Wang Yue, the two-year-old injured in two horrible hit-and-runs in China has died. Read the rest of this entry »

In late September, 1988 I was a sophomore at Wheaton College. The air was alive with fall, colors were exploding on trees, students chatty and excited about new classes. The sweatshirts had been dug out of the bottom of dresser drawers. We were starting to order coffee, hot tea and hot chocolate at the Stupe, the campus snack bar. We were adjusting to new professors and their expectations. We’d barely gotten notice of our assigned chapel seats when Dr. Arthur Holmes took the stage in what would become inseparable from the culture of our shared four undergraduate years, the “Isms, Ists & Anti-ism-ists” message he delivered to roughly 2,000 of us in Edman Hall. I don’t think a single student in my graduating class forgets it. Honestly, I couldn’t have told you what that address was about, but I always remembered its title. We students would forever associate that phrase with any mention of the philosophy department or Dr. Holmes. Read the rest of this entry »

Procrastination. Enter it in the little window adorned with a “g” at the top of your browser, and find, among other things, the following reasons why we procrastinate: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m thinking of home again, of the life we left when we vacated a house and neighborhood we’d lived in for almost 15 years. Every once in while, this past brushes up against my skin and, unguarded, the tears come. Like fringe on an old blanket, the faint and gentle threads of this past linger. I knew the blanket so well, knew its threads, the way they fit together and moved. But the fringes are different. Thin and lacking substance, fringes are like ghosts. I feel them unexpectedly, brushing up against a new day in a new place, and suddenly I remember that old blanket that was home and neighborhood and haven. In a cool draft, I miss its warmth and mass. Read the rest of this entry »

Though a devastating flood in Pakistan has, as of the time of my writing, taken nearly 300 lives, it got barely a few lines of coverage in today’s news outlets. A thwarted attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul got a few more lines so far, but I had to search to find news of a bus and train collision in Argentina. Instead, most of what has been deemed newsworthy for American media outlets so far today is financial in nature. Bank of America has announced it will eliminate 30,000 jobs over the next few years. Stocks continue to decline, and the loss of U.S. jobs prompts discussion over regulation review. On the heels of reports come interviews with banking experts and financial pundits. If you are one to agonize over uncertainty or fret over your finances, current news reporting would be great exposure therapy, that psychological technique of helping the fearful overcome their fears by exposure. Read the rest of this entry »

On this tenth anniversary of 9-11, we relive the day that the towers of the World Trade Center buckled and collapsed, the day the Pentagon smoked and airplanes crashed. Televisions across the country re-broadcast pictures of flames pouring out of the jagged chasm in the North Tower. September 11 would be the day our national self image was forever altered, and its images are a flood of memories. We remember. We struggle to explain the event to children who didn’t yet exist when it all happened. Emotions are once again fresh and sore. And as we revisit the terrorist attack, I am amazed at how grief is an attack of its own, often unsuspected until it is upon us. Read the rest of this entry »