August 1, 2022
Habits of slow time
Having recently moved, our new (old) house now echoes. Without rugs on the floors or curtains on the windows, with some rooms either completely empty or sparsely furnished, the house has a certain hollow sound. On the first morning after our move, while the kids slept, I could hear Ryan upstairs. “What were you doing up there?” I asked when he finally came downstairs. “It sounded like you were hammering pictures into the walls.” But he was not, in fact, decorating before dawn. He was opening and closing sticky closet doors.
It is strange that life can so suddenly be new. That you can’t recognize the sounds of your own house, that you can’t know to operate the light switches, that you can’t reliably plan the route of morning errands. Which is closer: Home Depot, Crate and Barrel, or Walmart? Last Thursday, when I drove my older son to school for soccer practice, he reminded me I couldn’t turn left at the stoplight at the bottom of our hill. Right, I said. He was congratulating himself for remembering this, but then of course I took a wrong turn trying to find a different intersection. “That’s ok,” I reassured him. “I know another way.” And I did, which is to say that I am learning this new city, these new streets, even if slowly.
I am getting better at keeping slow time these days. A week ago, I was at Verizon another two and a half hours trying to get a cell phone—this delay, after totaling ten previous hours on the phone and in the store. I dutifully drove home for the paperwork I’d already brought once to the store, and while I waited, my mother and I drank coffee on the patio at the bagel shop next door. When we finally left with cell phones, the store manager—a Brit, transplanted to Cincinnati fifteen years ago—apologized repeatedly for the beleaguered process of proving my identity and verifying my address. He thanked me for my good humor.
I suppose part of my good humor, at least on this particular morning, was owed to a sense of realism about what a move, especially an international move, requires. Nothing is easy or efficient. Ryan and I realized this at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles when we arrived with what we thought was the necessary paperwork for registering our cars and transferring our drivers licenses to the State of Ohio. As it turns out, we would not only have to restart the licensing process here in Ohio—including a road test now scheduled for August. Because we hadn’t properly imported our minivan when crossing the Canadian-American border, we would need to drive to Kentucky to plead for mercy and hopefully leave with a signed attestation that our car was paid for and met EPA and DOT emissions standards.
It was, and it did.
Paperwork has been a part-time job for me recently. There has been financial and medical paperwork I’m handling for my mother. There has been school registration paperwork for our twins, whom we’ve enrolled in a new school. It seems whole days can be swallowed by administrative tasks.
In our technological environment, it is easy to think that life should yield to us with little resistance. We want to push buttons and bark commands at Alexa, and we want these effortless gestures to relieve us the hassles of physical effort and repetitive motion. We certainly don’t want to have to wait. But I’m coming to see that these aren’t only unrealistic expectations; they’re dangerous ones. Our digital environment disorders our desires and ensures we are pained unduly by inconvenience. It convinces us that the real meaning of life exists on some cosmic plane untethered from calls to insurance companies and hours-long visits to the BMV. It doesn’t allow for the formation that can happen in the middle of ordinary days when, yes, someone has mistakenly put your new cell phone in the recycling bin. Expectations for life to exist at its easiest and most efficient postpones our faithful participation in the middle of seasons like mine. We count on being ready for life . . . when life really begins.
But life is really happening today. It is happening as you hang blinds and write reports and book the dog for a delinquent grooming appointment. If God is in all time—and he is, because in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28)—this Monday morning matters, even if you’re spending it at the BMV.
An important habit of slow time is welcoming the interruption and inconvenience of the muddled human experience. It is practicing the believing trust that in God’s kingdom, there is time plenty for all that needs to be done.
Yours for another week,
Jen