Attending to Life

When I pine for my phone, I can feel it on my skin, a tingle akin to a lover walking into the room. Patricia Lockwood calls it “the portal,” glowing with the promise of significance and connection. Smartphones act like the enchanted Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, which shows us what our heart desires, but never allows us to reach out and take it. Dumbledore tells Harry, after he’s sat up all night gazing at it, “Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”

Perhaps I am especially susceptible to the lure of technological connection, unusually weak-willed, because I have sometimes felt like I am being driven mad. I have two young children and all too regularly have a phone in my hand when they are trying to talk to me. It always feels like something important, worth the moment of disconnection, but at a distance I can see that I am often just scrolling listlessly and restlessly. I have social media blockers on all my devices, which worked well until I discovered you could switch them off easily. They invented a locked mode; I learned to delete the blocker app. Now I download and delete my blockers multiple times a day, like an overeater hiding food from themselves and repeatedly opening the cupboard.

You might not associate this endemic distraction with sloth, but before there was sloth, there was acedia. Acedia is both the Latin word we now translate as sloth and for many centuries its precursor. It’s not simple laziness but a richer, more capacious concept, difficult to translate. I also think it is endemic, the unnamed temptation of our times.

John Cassian, a monk writing in the early fifth century, described brothers with acedia experiencing

bodily listlessness . . . as though he were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast. . . . Next he glances about and sighs that no one is coming to see him. Constantly in and out of his cell, he looks at the sun as if it were too slow in setting.

Listlessness, distraction, apathy, restlessness. A monk never called it this, but I recognize it most in my own life when I’m dawdling. Failing to settle to anything, craving something, trying to sate a snackishness I’m only semiconscious of. Time feels either baggy or tight. The opposite of flow.

The monks who first coined acedia called it the “noonday demon,” the post-lunch slump when all the focus and energy of the morning has worn off. It wasn’t originally seen as a sin in itself, more a state of mind to be avoided. Chaucer, in gloriously juicy Middle English, said it “for-sloweth and forsluggeth” anyone attempting to act.

Acedia leaves me pinging around like a pinball, a “forsluggish” one sometimes, but also like the monk popping restlessly in and out of her cell hoping for a visitor, or a notification. Too many of my days are lived in this scattered state. Acedia neuters my ability to do good in the world, or even just properly enjoy it.

I don’t want to be a pinball. I want to be a plant.

With a concept this broad, there isn’t one opposite, but I’ve come to believe that the antonym of acedia is attention. The etymological root of attention is stretching toward something, moving intentionally closer. Ideally, I would decide carefully what warrants my attention, which people, ideas, objects or projects have sufficient meaning and value for me to spend a part of my fleeting life attending to them. I would stretch towards those things that will help me be kinder, freer, more just. Things that bring me genuine joy. Primarily, for me, people and relationships, but also meaningful work, meaningful play, beauty, real rest.

No matter how many articles I’ve read about how tech companies manipulate us with dopamine hits and our Pavlovian response to notifications (articles I’ve found via social media), it’s easy not to see the full danger of it. We are so seduced by the convenience and gloss and repeated tiny emotional rewards for compliance that we don’t recognize the opportunity cost. How rapidly our lives are passing with our minds resting primarily on matters only pixel deep.

Philosopher and later Catholic martyr Thomas More wrote: “Many things know we that we seldom think on. And in the things of the soul, knowledge without remembrance little profiteth.”

In other words, the things I “know” but fail to train my attention on do me little good. I wanted to live primarily for relationships, but the war on my attention means I am often failing, forgetting to remember what I know. When I stop to notice it, I feel actual rage. It is hard enough to live a good life, to do the work, to grow, without a context that is actively working against those things. I have to remind myself that learning to attend to what is important has always been a part of wisdom paths, distraction always a hurdle to overcome. Monetizing and mining our attention has accelerated, but isn’t brand-new. Dorothy L. Sayers summarized the messaging of advertising in 1933 as:

Whatever you’re doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you’re buying, pause and buy something different. Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down.

Sayers’ exclamation marks help me recognize the artificial urgency, to feel in my body the way the messaging of our culture is fracturing my relationship to time. Go! Go! Go! Do! Do! Do! Shiny! New! Over here! Take your eyes off the people in front of you and keep moving. Don’t stretch steadily and intentionally towards the most important things, but ping around responsively, because this whole engine is running off your distracted, restless hustle.

My culture is telling me, in a million different ways, to never be satisfied.

I want to be satisfied.

I want to stop pinging around and put my roots down deep. I need to learn to draw nourishment from the gifts I have already received, the relationships in front of me. I am taking back my time and my attention.

It was only in my thirties that I began fully recognizing the powerful resources my tradition offers in this quest. I have come to the conclusion that training attention and structuring time are the hidden genius of religions. Yes, they give ethical guidance and existential comfort, but the centuries-honed tools they offer are a pragmatic, applicable and sane response to the madness of distraction and hurry.

The Rule of St. Benedict, the urtext for monastic thought, implies that it is precisely a well-ordered rhythm of days that keeps distraction at bay. Acedia is presented as a disruption of rhythm, a bum note in the song of the hours. I love Abraham Joshua Heschel’s term for disordered time: “the screech of dissonant days.” I react badly to the idea of a schedule but a rhythm sounds inviting. When I’m living in rhythm, time feels less like a quarry or an enemy and more like a dance partner.

A few years ago I decided that if St. Benedict was right then ordering my time is part of how I tend to my soul. I’ve been attempting to beat back my endemic acedia with a range of spiritual practices (you could call them spiritual technologies) that the church has used for centuries, and to do it not in a burst of enthusiasm that I then lose a few weeks later, but over years. Much to my annoyance, repetition seems to be the key. Our novelty-obsessed culture is allergic to repetition, associating it with dullness and scarcity, but that is a problem. Research on neuroplasticity and the power of habit only confirms what religions have always taught—the repeated, committed choices we make day after day are the sum of who we become. This means our own Rule of Life, the way we structure our time (whether by accident or design), is one of the most important choices we can make.

All these practices, as I learn to use them properly and regularly, feel like a trellis. They are helping me train my attention on the connected relationships I say I want to define my life. I feel saner, calmer, more focused. Spiritually alive.

Daily rhythms: prayer and contemplation

I try to start the day with some kind of prayer. I can’t pretend to live a full monastic rhythm every day, though I do try—and usually succeed, now—in keeping reasonable boundaries around work and making time for rest and hospitality. It’s the commitment of part of my morning to prayer and sacred reading, though, despite all my natural instincts, that has been most transformative. Several times a week it is with others in the chapel. Other days prayer might just be journaling my thoughts vaguely heavenward in bed. Often, alone, with our community or with the kids over breakfast, I use written prayers from a modern monastic community based in Northumberland.

One line lifted from the Psalms always stops my distracted thoughts in their tracks: “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12 KJV).

A modern paraphrase might be: Teach us to take our lives, our time seriously. Help us apply our hearts, turn our attention, orient our desires to wisdom. Help us to really live.

Saying the same things regularly has the effect of writing and overwriting the words onto my consciousness, reminding me of and reorienting me to what I want this day to be about.

Daily rhythms: sacred reading

I also read the Bible in the morning. It’s my founding text, the narrative I locate myself in. Its strange oblique stories act as a counterweight to the cultural soup I’m swimming in the rest of the time. It never fails to provoke, inspire or infuriate me. I am currently reading the Bible with a group of friends. We call it “wild Bible study” because in reading and chatting together we are not after one right answer, not seeking to solve anything. I used to try to read it like this, not least because many Bible study notes do make it feel like the text is a puzzle to be solved, its vivid and dense language in need of putting into doctrinal boxes. I found that approach boring, so I stopped going to Bible studies. Now I don’t worry that there are many things I don’t understand, whole books and passages I don’t know what to do with. I don’t think either Bible reading or faith itself is about resolution. It is a lot more like poetry, drama or music, which any good teacher will tell you are not completely amenable to the question “But what does it mean?” I want only to keep tasting it, turning it up to the light like a crystal to see just how much it holds.

Weekly rhythms: sabbath

On Friday night, roughly as my work day ends, I turn off my phone, my iPad and my laptop and light a candle. It’s a precious moment of peace. Then I jump up, hunt down a housemate, thrust all my devices hurriedly into their arms and ask them to hide them and (this with slightly wild eyes) NOT give them back to me on pain of death for twenty-four hours.

Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t, because the way we have set up society means there is usually (what seems like) a very important reason to turn them back on. If I can’t get said housemate to crack I just use my husband’s phone. More recently, we’ve tried committing to doing this together, as a community, which has helped a bit. I still successfully manage twenty-four hours “off devices only” about half the time, but the attempt every week feels important.

Tech sabbaths and digital detoxes, even half-arsed ones like mine, are a modern iteration of one of the oldest ideas in civilization. In the second chapter of the Hebrew Bible, itself one of the oldest documents we have, [God] undertakes six days of creative work, and rests on the seventh. He blesses the day and declares it “holy” (Gen. 2:3 ESV)

Theologian Walter Brueggemann called the practice of sabbath an act of resistance. The word conjures French fighters, stylishly sabotaging Nazi infrastructure while smoking Gauloises. Imagining myself in a beret with red lipstick really helps when I attempt to turn off my phone for a day. It’s certainly a more attractive image than the grey, dull associations most of us carry. Sabbath sounds to us like the shop closing early just when we’ve run out of milk. It sounds like restriction. Which it is. But it is also through restriction, liberation.

For most of the week, my value is in what I produce and what I consume. If I’m not careful my main goal in a day becomes being impressive and competent, subtly signaling my status with the things I buy, say and post.

Sabbath is the opposite. It is a line in the sand. Today I am just a person, and a person is beyond price. Sabbath is about valuing, fighting for and fiercely guarding rest.

I have had to learn to choose rest in a culture that only really recognizes frantic work and exhausted, passive leisure, ideally consumed using the same screens we’ve been working on all day, produced by the same small number of global corporations. Despite being deeply convinced of my need for rest, sometimes the only way I can justify sabbath to myself is on a productivity basis. Jews, who have been persecuted and mocked partly for their observance of it, have had to do this over the centuries. The Romans (proto-neoliberals?) were contemptuous of it, believing it revealed laziness to have a day off a week. Philo, a first-century Jew, made the case that his community was more effective and productive because of their day off: “A breathing spell enables not merely ordinary people but athletes also to collect their strength with a stronger force behind them to undertake promptly and patiently each of the tasks set before them.” Rabbi Joshua Heschel, though, condemns this justification, saying, “Here the Sabbath is represented not in the spirit of the Bible but in the spirit of Aristotle.” For Jews and Christians, the sabbath is not designed to serve work, because love, not work, is our ultimate end. It always moves me that the sabbath command was given directly after the Exodus, to a nation that had until recently been enslaved for generations. There is a tenderness in mandating rest and play for traumatized people who had only ever known enforced labor.

Mandated time to rest seems a foreign notion now. It’s become one of the few clear political intuitions I have: that it shouldn’t be. Breaking time, and people, into ever flexible units of production is one of the strongest drivers of disconnection that we experience. I have come to see sabbath as central for my personal project of connection, with myself, with my family and community and with [God]. It’s a relational reset every week, a bulwark against the instrumentalization of relationships and the commodification of time.

And rest is, fundamentally, about being human. About recognizing our limits when advertising tells us we are limitless. It requires intention, and working out what we do actually find restorative. It is going in the bath with a book for me (but not with an iPad), or gardening, or rollerblading, or puttering around charity shops without my phone. I need to not have access to the news or social media in order to rest.

It might seem counterintuitive to prescribe rest as a medicine for the sin that is often known as sloth, but I think it’s right. Proper rhythms of real rest rather than passive leisure consumption make focus easier when we need to work, make it more likely we will find joy and flow in it when we do.

Weekly rhythms: liturgy

The point of a liturgy is to continually direct our desires. They are heart-shaping technologies and they help create our character. No formation without repetition, the saying goes; we are what we repeatedly do.

Philosopher James K. A. Smith calls secular versions “cultural liturgies,” and names going to a football game or a regular trip to the shopping mall as examples. Both involve their own rituals. Smith’s work has helped me see the power of repetition, ritual and image to form and orient me. It’s made me more aware of how often I am mindlessly participating in liturgies that are shaping me in directions in which I have not consciously consented to go. And so I now see participating in church liturgy as a form of pushback, another little resistance. I am making a free(r) choice about what I want to shape me, what values and desires I want inscribed on my heart and mind. Particularly in a church that uses a small number of set texts again and again, as all Catholic and most Anglican churches do, the words can become deeply ingrained. This can sound dull and rote. Like most teenagers and young people, I spent a long season thinking only entirely spontaneous, “authentic” self-expression counted, including in prayer, and that all tradition and structure was deadening.

However, as I age I begin to see the value of regular (even, whisper it, sometimes mindless) repetition. Some days the words come alive and feel deeply sincere, my thinking is stretched and enriched by their beauty, and other days I say them out of habit, but they are always forming me. Every week I give at least part of my attention to a ritual that reminds me of the things I am in danger of forgetting. I use my body as well as my mind, standing and kneeling and sitting and singing. I often dance around at the back and have stopped caring about the curious glances. During the various Covid-related lockdowns and restrictions it was this singing and dancing I missed the most. My voice is nothing special, but belting a song with a hundred other people can’t help but sound beautiful. I often cry. For an hour and a half I don’t look at my phone, and when I come out my thoughts feel saner and steadier.

Elizabeth Oldfield is the host of The Sacred podcast and the author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, from which this essay is excerpted.

Art by Seth Neilson.

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