Focus:
Keeping a gentle, reliable rhythm for the rest of our lives.
Repetition:
My body trusts rhythm.
I begin each day the same gentle way.
I am steady, I am slow, and I have nothing to prove.
Convenience and the Slow Methods of the Past
This week I want to talk about balance. Not the balance of a scale, but the balance of a life that uses modern comforts without being owned by them.
We have spent two years learning the slow methods of the past, and many of us have fallen in love with them. We ferment, we simmer stock, we hang laundry, we garden, we make our own soap. I do not want any of us to become dogmatic here either.
Technology Includes the Wheel
When we say “technology,” we usually picture a screen. But technology also includes the wheel, the plow, the knife, eyeglasses, the woodstove, the canning jar, the refrigerator, indoor plumbing, and the washing machine. Every one of those was once a new and startling convenience.
The washing machine gave women back whole days of their lives, days that had been spent hauling water, boiling, scrubbing, and wringing until their hands cracked. That is not a loss to mourn. It is a mercy.
A wheelbarrow is not a moral failing, a refrigerator is not a compromise, and there is nothing holy about doing a thing the hard way simply because it is hard. So we are not going to romanticize every difficulty of the past, and we are certainly not going to shame each other over a dishwasher.
The Real Question
The question is never “is this old or is this new.” The question is: what does this tool do to my body, my attention, my relationships, and my skills?
Some tools remove drudgery and give us back time and health, and there is no formation lost in letting them. The washing machine, the well pump, the refrigerator, and the car belong in that group.
Other tools remove the very work that was forming us. When a tool takes over our thinking, our memory, our attention, our hands, our movement, or our patience, the convenience has a cost, and we should know what we are paying.
The Digital Brain
The screen is the tool that deserves the most watchfulness, because it does not just save us labour, it reshapes how we think. Researchers have watched this happen, and it is worth knowing what they have found.
When we read on screens, we comprehend and remember less than when we read the same text on paper, especially when we are reading to understand something. We skim in a Z or an F shape down a page instead of reading it, and we do this even when we slow down and try not to.
When we write by hand, studies using EEG show far more widespread connection across the brain than when we type the same words, because the hand, the eye, and the memory are all working together. When we take notes by hand we understand more deeply, even though we write fewer words.
When we hand our memory to a device, our brain stops bothering to store what it knows the device is keeping, which is why so many of us cannot remember a phone number, a recipe we have made twenty times, or the way to a friend’s house. That last one has actually been measured. Researchers found that people who habitually use GPS to get everywhere have poorer spatial memory and a harder time finding their own way, and the more years of habitual GPS use, the worse it was. The part of the brain that builds our inner map is the same part that is deeply involved in memory generally, and it is built by use.
Then there is our attention. Every time we switch tasks, a piece of our attention stays behind with the last thing, so a day of constant switching leaves us with a mind that is never fully anywhere. Apps are designed around unpredictable rewards, the same design principle that makes a slot machine compelling, and our dopamine system is exquisitely sensitive to exactly that.
And in all of this we lose the empty moments. When our minds have nothing to do, they wander, and a wandering mind is where connections form, where problems solve themselves in the shower, and where creativity comes from. Researchers have found that a period of mind-wandering, doing something simple and undemanding, improves creative problem-solving afterward. We have abolished those moments. There is no waiting in line, no staring out of the window, no quiet drive, and no boredom, and we wonder why we feel less creative than we did as children.
Keep Analog in Your Life
So keep analog things in your life on purpose.
- Read paper books, and keep a paper journal, which we have been doing for two years now.
- Write letters and thank-you notes by hand.
- Keep a paper calendar and a paper cookbook.
- Do arithmetic in your head sometimes, and let yourself find the way home without the map.
- Memorise things again, prayers, poems, scripture, your family’s phone numbers.
- Make music rather than only playing it through a speaker.
- Keep one craft in your hands, sewing, knitting, whittling, pottery, drawing, bread, or the garden.
- Let your children be bored, and let yourself be bored too.
- Have one room and one hour of the day where no screen enters.
The Science of Always Choosing Comfort
Now let us talk about why we also want to keep some difficult, slow things in our lives on purpose. A body only keeps what it uses. Muscle, bone, balance, grip, heat tolerance, cold tolerance, patience, and skill are all built by demand and lost by disuse.
Modern life removes demand at every turn, and it does it so pleasantly that we do not notice. The elevator, the drive-through, the leaf blower, the heated seat, the delivery, and the app that does the small hard thing for us. Each one is fine. All of them together produce a body and a mind that have not been asked for anything in years.
There is a fascinating line of research on this. When we do difficult things we do not feel like doing, a particular region of the brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex becomes more active, and it appears to grow with that kind of effort. This same region is notably robust in the people researchers call superagers, the elderly who keep their sharpness into very old age. Doing hard things on purpose seems to be, quite literally, how we keep our will and our vitality.
There is more. Confidence is not built by being told we are capable, it is built by the experience of having done something difficult. Every hard thing we finish is evidence, and the mind treats evidence very differently than it treats encouragement. Working with our hands on something real, slowly, until it is done, also produces a satisfaction that no convenience can imitate, and we value the things we made with effort far more than the things that simply arrived.
And there is a mild, useful kind of stress that strengthens us, the sort found in a cold rinse at the end of a shower, a long walk in the wind, a hill, a heavy basket, a hot kitchen, or a fast until the next meal. This is not the pushing and punishing we warned against in Week Ninety Four. It is small, brief, and followed by rest, and the body adapts by becoming more capable. Avoiding all discomfort makes us fragile, and a nervous system that has never handled anything mildly hard begins to read ordinary life as hard.
Finding the Balance
Here is how I think about it in my own home.
- Let the machines do the drudgery that has no formation in it.
- Let your hands do the work that forms you.
- Choose the slow method for the things that feed your soul, and let it be a joy rather than a duty.
- Use technology as a tool that you pick up and put down, not as a companion that lives in your pocket.
- Use the good of it generously, because we found free movement teachers and old documentaries and beautiful books through a screen this very month.
- And keep enough difficulty in your life that your body and your will stay strong.
This Week
- Choose one convenience to set down for the week, and notice what comes back.
- Choose one slow method to take up, and do it with pleasure rather than obligation.
- Write one letter by hand.
- Take one trip without the map.
- Let yourself be bored for fifteen minutes with nothing in your hands.
And then, without guilt, go run your washing machine.