Less Than Living

So often the lives we lead in our society are so much less than life. Our frenzied busyness has become what we now call life. We are hurried to exhaustion.

We work jobs we hate to buy things we don’t need so we can amuse ourselves with things we don’t really enjoy in the end.

We heap up knowledge about things that are trivial without any deeper self-knowledge that is vital.

We weary ourselves at a daily pace of existence that deprives us of life so that we can “enjoy the weekend.”

We long to simple get away from life without giving thought to the restorative necessity of getting into the life before us.

We strive for thrills and hype and climactic events to distract us into believing our own importance, without giving subtle attention to the still small voice that speaks love into and around us about our true significance.

We peer over mental fences for greener pastures in others’ lives or careers or homes, minimizing the wonder and joy found in the arcs and caverns of our own multi-faceted daily existence. If only we could see all there is in one minute!

We strive to put our children into training for this decayed life pattern through ever-earlier scheduled activities, only to wonder why they struggle with depression and being attentive.

We misunderstand education as information, never learning to become the people most needed in our world.  Hoping someone else will step into that, we are surprised when it isn’t us.