If you read Conversion Diary, you will know about her reckless experiment with prayer and its fruits. I am going to try a reckless experiment of my own.
For the ten years that we have had an internet connection in our home, I have struggled with my use of time. It's so easy to sit down and piddle away half an hour. Or more. I have tried to set limits for myself. It doesn't work very well. I give up reading blogs for Lent, say, but then I succumb to the lure of the Ravelry forums instead. I say I'll only spend x amount of time on the computer. It always expands. Always.
I am still thinking about New Year's resolutions here. (I know the new year started two weeks ago, but I am giving myself an extension since I had a baby on the 23rd of December. Oh! I keep meaning to follow through on my promise of chocolate to the person who guessed when the baby would arrive -- more on that very soon.) Over the weekend I was in the adoration chapel with the baby and felt a tug toward a deeper prayer life -- a call, specifically, to pray without ceasing.
I am going to work on that in two ways, both of which were prompted by another look at A Mother's Rule of Life. First, the easy part if I will only remember it, is to invite the presence of God regularly throughout the day. It's funny, but I started doing this when I was in a rough spot. I was feeling blue and easily angered, wondering if I was sliding toward some postpartum mood disorder, and so my prayers went like, "Lord, I invite you into this moment when I have just bellowed at my children." Or, "I invite you into the cleanup of this exploded light bulb which is SO not how I want to be spending my time." But maybe that was a good place to start, because I need to remember that the Lord is not a guest who only wants to visit when the kitchen is clean and the hand towels are freshly laundered.
The harder part, the part that feels a little crazy, is that I am going to try to cut down radically on computer drift by spending less time on purely recreational computer use (reading blogs, playing games, goofing around on Ravelry or Facebook or whatever comes along next) than I do in prayer. Gulp. That will be, let me make it clear, a significant shift.
I will need to do some fine-tuning of this idea. If I put writing blog posts or dealing with email into the "purely recreational" category, I will never post and will be perpetually behind on email. If I don't, it will be easy for me to let that time balloon. There is a part of me that really likes the anesthetic effect of sitting down in front of the screen and drifting for a while. But that phrase -- "the anesthetic effect" -- is key here: I don't want to be like the alcoholic who gives up drinking but starts smoking pot daily.
Maybe an important part of the balance is to invite God into my computer use as well. I don't know exactly what it will look like. I only know that I'm tired of the imbalance, and ready to make a change.
I wrote this post yesterday and got cold feet at the end. Did I want to hit publish on a post announcing that I'm going to attempt something I will be certain to struggle with? Struggle a lot, even? But I think I do. There are 350 days, 50 weeks, left in 2009. How much can I grow in prudence and detachment over those 50 weeks? No idea. But if I don't try, I'll never find out.
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