Reclaiming time
Silence alone is not the totality. Contemplation means reclaiming time.
The vibe in our culture right now feels anxious. The constant barrage of news, the irrational decisions of the government, the intentional cruelty has many of us on edge.
That edge, that anxiousness, comes at a price. Our limbic system is meant to capacitate us for fight or flight. When it stays engaged too long, our hearts, our minds, our souls can become weary, reactive, taxed.
A few years ago, in a congressional hearing, Rep. Maxine Waters caught the public imagination by the way she insisted on “reclaiming my time.” The Treasury Secretary was attempting to dodge her questions, and she would not yield. This was her time. She wasn’t giving it away to him.
That phrase, in recent days, has held my imagination. What would it mean to reclaim our time in anxious days. How can we set aside time for rest, for joyful pursuits, for turning off our devices and cultivating slower, less stressful, gentler ways of being.
The Christian contemplative tradition places great stock in silence, in quieting the busyness of the mind. But silence alone is not the totality. Contemplation means reclaiming time. For walks. For slow meals with friends and family. Where I live in New Mexico, it means sitting in the sun of a chilly morning, with good tea, smelling the piñon and mesquite filling the air like incense. It means unplugging from work, production, and angst.
The theologian John Swinton has argued that our culture’s addiction to speed means that we leave too much behind. We rush past people with disabilities, people whose brains and bodies don’t move at the pace we have chosen for life. Slowing down is not only a matter of self-care, but of justice. Swinton argues the speed our society moves isn’t natural, it isn’t Godly.
As I write these words, I know there are communities and people who don’t have the luxury to choose. Immigrant communities in this country have anxiousness imposed upon them by the raids which have become a structural part of this administration’s injustice. The people of Gaza have been forced to flee back and forth across a small strip of land to avoid the latest attacks, running constantly for food and shelter. In cases like these justice can’t be slow, we must stop the attacks altogether.
And I find myself wondering, for those of us who can choose, whether reclaiming our time, slowing the amount of attention we feed the news cycles, might be its own form of protest. Refusing to lavish attention on politicians who desperately seek our attention gives us power to redefine relationships.
I wonder how you might claim back at least some of your time? How might you choose the energy with which you engage? Could we move forward in a non-anxious way? Grounding our work in a different way of being may be the only Christian way to work for change.