Barry's Blog

The story is told of a young man who was writing a book about the people of Appalachia. As he made his way through a mountain valley, he noticed a large, old house with an old man sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair, with a cigar in his mouth. He thought to himself, "I ought to interview this old man to see what keeps him going, he's so old!" He sat down beside the old man and inquired, "Tell me, you men of Appalachia live to be so old, what's the secret?" The old man responded, "It's no secret to me!" The writer replied, "What do you mean?" To this the old man replied, "Well, I drink a quart of homemade whiskey every day, I smoke at least a half dozen cigars like these every day, and I chase women at night." With a look of astonishment, the young writer replied, "That's incredible! Just how old are you?" With a calmness in his voice, he said, "I'll be thirty-two this October..."

While most of us don't live life like this man from Appalachia, many of us lament the frantic pace of contemporary life as we seek that elusive thing called "Happiness." A new term has even been coined for our multi-tasking of various duties we juggle between work, family, and leisure: "time stacking."  Time stackers are people who juggle multiple tasks at once, a behavior that has become rampant among business professionals. In their book a few years ago, Time for Life: The Surprising Way Americans Use Their Time, professors Geoffrey Godbey and John Robinson, having studied the time-diaries of over 8,000 people over past decades, discovered that with the advent of current technology and communication comes the heightened expectation of how productive we should be. Yet the more we busy our lives seeking fulfillment and happiness, pursuing success in this life, strangely, we are often met with a certain disillusionment and hollowness.

Writing over four centuries ago, Blaise Pascal, the French scientist and philosopher who was mentioned in another recent  blog, left arguably his most profound legacy in his unfinished notes and essays collected and published after his death, known as the Pensees (loosely translated as "thoughts, meditations"). Pascal believed that, "If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it..." (#30), He further observed: "I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. A man wealthy enough for life's needs would never leave home to go to sea or besiege some fortress if he knew how to stay at home and enjoy it...the only good thing for men therefore is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which takes their mind off it, or by some novel and aggreable passion, which keeps them busy, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing show, in short, by what is called diversion. That is why gaming and feminine society, war and high office, are so popular. It is not that they really bring happiness...what people want is not the peaceful life...That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture. That is why men are so fond of the hustle and the bustle..."

These ponderings of Pascal are some of the most powerful and relevant for our modern culture, which largely seeks validation by worldly achievement and success. Ironically, our culture has more leisure than any generation that has come before us, and yet, are we truly happy or content? We run around, harried and hassled, and complaining that we never have enough time, though in reality we really don't want to simplify our lives. In actuality, we want the very thing we complain about. We gripe about not having enough time to kick back, unwind, and reflect, but for most of us, such a thing would be unbearable! Why? Because we seek to be diverted from thinking about transcendent things. We crave diversions to keep us from genuine solitude.

Peter Kreeft, in his remarkable book, Christianity for Modern Pagans, writes: "If you are typically modern, your life is like a rich mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiply diversions."

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow