In the Land of 24/7
Dick Tracy
All this immediacy, all this instantaneousness, was once just a Concord-jet, super-spin-cycle washing machine fantasy only a few decades ago. Now it’s the expected normal. We feel entitled to instant gratification, deserving of an immediate materializing of our wants. That realized science fiction projection has been gobbled up as “Progress”, but there are hints that it is, in fact, leaving us with a persistent stomach-ache – read the latest psychology journals and you’ll see glaring statistics that anxiety is on the rise, depression is ‘epidemic’, and creativity quotient scores are plummeting. Was it utopia they were writing about, or was it, in fact, a dystopic vision? Behind the Wizard’s curtain is there another reality we’re missing?
“You shall celebrate three pilgrimage festivals for Me each year (Exodus 23:14).”
In the Jewish calendar we are fast approaching the holiday of Shavuot, one of the three annual pilgrimage festivals. Pilgrimage means “going on a journey, especially a long one, made to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion (dictionary.com; my emphasis). We’re not told just to celebrate a holiday, or have a festival, we’re told to pilgrimage. Hit the road. Take a journey. A LONG JOURNEY.
Digging into the meaning of the pilgrimages, a starting point is noticing that they all three take place right smack in the middle of the busiest times of working life for the farmer: spring planting and field preparations, first harvest, and last harvest. In other words, right in the middle of when the work demands are at their most pressing, the command is to set it all down and go on a long journey to make a celebration for God. To contextualize that in modern terms it’s like stopping and going on vacation on April 10th for an accountant, at the beginning of fourth quarter for retailers, or right before you have that huge presentation to try and land that next new client.
Dang. That feels highly inconvenient.
In this mythical world of immediacy in which we live, the command to stop in the middle of when we are most busy is anxiety-producing if not down-right brain-exploding. Who can stop working? Who can set down their email? Think of all you might be missing! All the posts, all the threads, all the Tweets! The clients that might stream to your competitors, the mountains of e-paperwork that will be waiting, the episodes of Stranger Things that will pile up!
And that’s exactly the point. Because in the middle of all that “get it when I want it” we trick ourselves into thinking that’s all there is. That getting is the goal. That the first link to pop up on Google is the answer. We careen down highways of “right now” without enjoying the ride, without getting lost and meandering down side roads where we can stumble across a something we didn’t know was there.
“Right now” makes us myopically goal-focused. We become obsessed with things like “highest”, “fastest”, “most”, enchanting ourselves into thinking we are little kings, little gods, like the child who keeps stacking block on block to build the highest tower. And it’s exactly that which the pilgrimage seeks to break. Stop. Right in the middle when we are most focused on what WE can do, our minds locked onto the end-points of all we are planting and harvesting, the Torah tells us to set it all down. Drop the goal. Take a walk. Go on a journey and see what else is out there. See what God can do, and discover that there’s more to life than all these goals we see in front of us.
There’s symptoms of our sickness everywhere. People ask “what am I going to get out of this?” instead of being excited about signing up for an adventure; we video concerts with our phones instead of dancing to the music; we take selfies instead of talking to the person looking at the same statue right next to us.
The children’s trick of waving a magic Google wand and conjuring up a million instant items eventually wears thin. Life flattens into the two-dimensional when we chase ‘want’ instead of ‘wonder’. Dropping it all, setting it down for a moment, in order to journey is the only way to recapture that sense of awe that comes from the unexpected marvel. Always knowing what we are going to get means that’s all we’re going to get. Stepping aside from it and taking a journey sets the stage for being surprised, going deep, encountering mystery. Re-discovering that process, not goal, is what this life journey is all about. Elevating from the material to touch the spiritual.
They wrote about us in the 1950’s, and they’ll write about us later, too – this mythical Land of 24/7. Will they write about a people who defined themselves by speed and consummation, flattened and imploded by the anxiety of never having enough, never stopping? Or will they write about a people who set it all down from time to time to take a walk, write a poem, listen to their inner Still Quiet Voice, celebrate a pilgrimage with God? A people expanded by their creativity, made three-dimensional by their deeper experiencing?
We write history by the choices we make today. Process or goal? Knowing or mystery? Instant or journey? In the film “While We’re Young” in the middle of a group of people who can’t think of the name of a dessert and are wanting someone to Google it the character Jamie says, simply: “Let’s just NOT know.” … Yeah.
