Five Things 8/11/23

Schedules, grocery stories, and making sense

1. Scheduling life has always been an obsession for me, I’ll admit—clear back to the days of my color-coded schedule for a family of six, where everyone’s every half-hour was laid out from waking to sleeping. I still believe the perfect schedule can save my life. Making the schedule for work has become a Tetris of lives that I have to turn and twist, and I take a small joy in fitting it all together. I keep resisting the urge to knock on wood or cross my fingers or hope to the schedule-gods everything will work out, but it is.

2. I tried grocery shopping with one ear bud in so I could finish listening to Scamanda. I am not proud of this, but I see other people in the stores with one earbud and I felt like I could multitask in this way. I can still smile and nod and defer to other shoppers, and I can tap the one earbud to pause what I’m listening to (which always makes me feel like a character from Person of Interest). I finished Scamanda (intrigued/angry/appalled/is there more to the story?) and I’ve listened to a few more podcasts while shopping. I’m not sure how I feel about this—it seems antithetical to my desire to make people feel seen and heard, and to rage against the ever-connected machine, yet it is very in tune with my natural inclination to disassociate; I shop twice a week for the deli (part of my schedule) so it seems like a good use of my time; sometimes the stimulation is too much; I miss out on observing some of the wild things that happen in a grocery store.

3. Last week there were two women shopping together, maybe sisters, in their sixties, and one was silent while the other narrated every step of her shopping experience. I’m going to get three of these peppers. I have a bag here for them in they go! Those will be good for stir fry tonight. Let’s look at the onions we need more onions. I think the ones we bought last week are gone oh! look how big these are! I pressed pause on my one earbud to get a better listen to this interaction and I felt great empathy for the silent sister, but I also thought of all the scenarios that would make the two of them this way, and I felt joy for the both of them, having each other like that. I basically made up a story for them, which is how we all deal with the world, isn’t it?

4. Another grocery store-y: on the crowded canned food aisle an older gentleman waited patiently for a mom with a cart of children to finish her looking, so he could politely pass by. Without even glancing up from the fruit cocktail, she barked at two un-carted ferals, urging them to get out of the way. The gentleman said Oh, they’re being very good kids as he passed, and he smiled but Mom didn’t see it, maybe didn’t hear him, either. I paused my podcast and told myself a thousand stories.

5. I’ve scheduled two writing blocks this week, very early in the morning. Today is the second. It’s not enough, but I can’t possibly get up any earlier. What gets scheduled, gets done I tell myself—another story made to deal with my world. The time block seems better for me at the moment than the to-do list, and since the writing is scheduled, my brain is always working on the stories. Making sense of the world is a fruitless endeavor, but making stories about it passes the time well. Life feels like an unfolding of God’s character this way.

Photos of Dogs, Looking at the Sky

Dogs only care about food, sleep, and going for walks, but I had these two photos from the week and thought how philosophical my dogs look. Walks are good for deeply pondering the stuff of life.

Good Things I’ve Saved

Keywords of the Moral Life: Purity//Myles Werntz. “The thing we seek here is not necessarily habit or better habits, but that which habits point to and make possible: singularity of life, better put as purity of heart.” (And it’s not all about sex.)

Maybe It’s Time to Let the Old Ways Die//Shawn Smucker. “I only care about what I would love to write, and perhaps, a little bit, about what this tiny circle of people around me love to read, because those things line up—my love and their love, my cares and theirs. And so that’s what I’m going to write about. A story about fallible fathers and what happens when raising kids doesn’t go the way you thought it would and what to do with a faith that’s been buried and might be gone and then somehow pushes up through the parched ground, sort of weak and anemic but somehow alive.”

Why Plant a Garden in a World at War?//

Ekstasis

by Lancia Smith. "We make beauty—gardens of every kind and craft—simply because it is our original telos as recounted in Genesis, the book of our beginnings: ‘Then Adonai Elohim took the man and gave him rest in the Garden of Eden in order to cultivate and watch over it.’”

Found in Psalm 8//Callie Feyen. I absolutely love the way Callie created this piece. It’s short so I won’t quote any of it…just check it out!

Have a great weekend, friends!

Tomorrow our youngest child sells his last 4H steer at auction…there are so many “lasts” with the last child, and it’s bittersweet. Then Monday at 12:01 a.m. I’ll be on the volleyball court to start my 6th season coaching high school girls. It’s amazing that just six years ago I was dumb and energetic enough to think that Midnight Practice and sleeping on the gym floor was a good way to start the season. But…tradition!