Reading Francis

Sufficient for a day…

I’ve noticed that the theme of a lot of current health trends is to stay in the moment. 

The key to strength training, I’m told, is to be intentional about each moment of each rep of weights; rather than seeing how many times you can lift something or how heavy a thing you can lift, maintaining an intentional effort throughout the process – focusing on keeping your muscles tense from the moment the weight lifts off the ground through the moment you put it back down – is the key. 

The same goes for cardio, where high intensity interval training emphasizes not the amount of time you’re moving, but how intensely you keep your focus in that time of movement. 

I haven’t read this anywhere, but I know personally that if, theoretically, I paid attention to every bite of food I ate, rather than shoveling in whatever was in front of me while I read/watched/listened to something else, I’d do a much better job of attending to what my body needed and be healthier as a result.

So it is with relationships. It’s great to spend a whole day in the company of someone you love, for sure. But it’s entirely different to spend time focused on each other than simply coexisting, side by side. And conversely, the easiest way I have found to devalue time with someone important to you is to be focused on something else when they have something to tell you. Damn you, internet!

Why is it so hard to stay in the moment, to be in the place your feet are?

Philosophers and theologians have debated for centuries what it is that separates us from other animals, and Reinhold Niebuhr has the best argument, for my money. Alone among the animals, he argues, we humans have the ability to see beyond ourselves, to take in the big picture, to look over the horizon. But along with that gift comes the weight of knowing our own limits. I can look back on a time before I existed, and I can look ahead to the time when I will no longer exist. And that makes me anxious. I am running out of time.

It’s the paradox of who we are that, driven by the fear of running out of time, we spend the time we have someplace other than the present moment. The more we dwell in the past or fret about the future, the less attention we pay to now, whether that now is doing something mundane (like eating or exercising or trying to sleep) or something transcendent like spending time with another. Much more so spending time with the ultimate Other; I have the grocery lists made in alleged prayer time to prove it.

Jesus covered this, you know. At the end of Matthew 6, in the section known as the Sermon on the Mount that is often considered the Cliff’s Notes of Jesus’ message, he says, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (6:34, NIV translation) I’ll admit I prefer the dark poetry of the NAB translation of that line: “Sufficient for a day is its own evil.”

Fr. Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries (one of my heroes) is the first person I saw turn “Now hear this” into “Now. Here. This.” in an effort to focus on the present. But some days, honestly, the best I can do is bracket off the past and future with “Sufficient for a day…”