Looking at Our Lifestyle

Good morning. It is early, the kids are sleeping, and it’s dark outside. I love this time of day when everything is new. I am sitting in my prayer corner, a renovated area of my home (it used to be the bar!), surrounded by books, pictures of my people, my favorite Divine Mercy Image, and Our Lady of Fatima. A fresh cup of coffee is steaming beside me. 

Knowing that I am making time for my personal writing makes me feel warm inside; I’ve been working to mold 12, 13 and 14 year olds into writers; it feels delicious to just sit and write for fun.

​

The topic that I really want to explore is Restoration. How can I live my life in a way that is more restorative? I am the matriarch of my clan. As I age, I want to be healthy and strong, peaceful and balanced.  

And yes, the word “restoration” would indicate that something is amiss; to restore means something is disordered, something is out of place. I need to go in and restore what was. 

What has been wrong? What’s amiss? Well, this is how it goes: in the morning I am Kate Winslet, standing on the upper front deck of the Titantic, arms outstretched, heart open to whatever God has for me that day. I am engaged. Ready. Yes, world, let’s go. 

And by the end of the day, I am exhausted, overwhelmed. So what is it about daily living that exhausts me? And yes, I have added a full-time gig into my life, but my exhaustion is deeper, more pervasive, and it's been going on for about ten years or so.

As I have pondered this, I thought back to how life “used to be.” 

Think for a moment about your grandparents and perhaps even your great grandparents. How did they spend their days? What was their pace? What was the flow and tempo of their life?

I loved going to Grandma and Grandpa Suda’s farm in God’s Country, Nebraska. I loved following Grandma around as she gathered and cleaned eggs to be sold, gardened and weeded her massive garden, prepared meals. 

I was mesmerized by my grandpa’s shop. The tools and machinery in that dark, dank place seemed to be covered in a layer of dirt or grease. It was a young girl’s heaven—I would putz around in my grandpa's machine shop, day dreaming about all of the inventions I could make. 

My sisters and I would spend hours out in their back pasture, looking for dinosaur bones. We never found any. Weird. 

For rest and relaxation, we would play bunco or rummy with Grandma. My sisters and I would play with dolls, trucks, blocks. We’d sneak onto Grandma’s party line and listen in on her neighbors’ conversations. (For those of you that do not know what I just wrote, telephones in rural areas were interconnected. If you wanted to talk to someone, a bunch of other someones—including curious little granddaughters—could listen in.) 

The pace at Grandma’s house was a good one. Work hard. Rest hard. Get up. Do it again. 

The most information and input that they received was from the six o’clock and ten o’clock news, the weekly newspaper or from neighbors.

Compare that to life in 2023.
I am connected to basically everyone in the world right now. Think about that. I can see the INNER WORKINGS of people’s lives. It’s intriguing and interesting on many levels.

I can learn about any topic. ANYTHING. I can open my computer (with my fingertip) or just glance at my smartphone (with face recognition) and I can find out about anything. I can listen to any topic on podcasts. My favorite people. In my little ear bud. At any time. 

I love it.

This is from a study done several years ago: people receive about 105,000 words coming at them in their wake hours. Of course, you and I cannot read 105,000 words each day, but it is the number estimated to be reaching the human eyes and ears every day.  
 
What does that look like? Well, the researchers said that the amount of info is about 34 gigabytes, which would overload a laptop in about a week. That’s what is coming into our lives. It is what is coming into the lives of our children. (And this has likely increased since the survey was done.)

Input. Information. A barrage of information. (Barrage was a recent sixth grade vocabulary word. It’s a good one; it means a concentrated artillery attack. We are barraged with information nowadays.)

And friends, my soul does not operate well at the speed of my smartphone. No wonder I am exhausted and overwhelmed on most days. No wonder. 

I do want to talk about finding restoration. But for today, I thought it was enough to just ponder how life has changed in the last twenty years. Think about your grandparents. Think about how they received information. Think of your life. You have the entire world in the palm of your hands, literally. How has that affected you? How is it affecting your children?

​