To my right, a large window looks out on downtown where the Mayo Clinic and Kahler Grand Hotel rise up amongst the other buildings that populate the area.
In the other room, I hear a middle-aged South African man named Jock, whose voice is recovering from a cold, discussing the pros and cons of technology with an IT specialist named Chad.
Right now, my soul is singing. I lived in Rochester for parts of two summers in high school, and it’s been a home to me ever since.
This is where I go – sometimes bodily, sometimes mentally – when I need a moment to breathe.
Yet if recent studies are any indicator, most of us are too busy to go to these places as often as we’d like. Rather, we spend a tremendous amount of time in places, real or metaphorical, we find much more stressful.
While those places and the problems that accompany them are different for each of us, they all point to a common root: We are exceedingly uncomfortable in the world we’ve created.
One study released last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only one out of three adults are getting enough sleep every night.
“At night we’re doing everything except for sleeping – we’re on the Internet, we may be watching TV. With these new lifestyles we have kind of taken sleep for granted as something that we can do when we have time or we can catch up on it on the weekends,” said study leader and CDC behavioral scientist Lela McKnight-Eily.
According to another study by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, 43 percent of Americans report being too busy to exercise as often as they’d like.
Yet interestingly, another study found that 84 percent of Americans watch at least three hours of television per week.
“People recognize the benefits of exercise, but they just won’t do it,” lamented council spokesman Phillip Wiethorn. “They’re too tired, too lazy, too busy.”
Comedian Louis C.K. summed it up in a now-famous rant on Conan O’Brien’s late night show, in which he lamented the lifestyle of modern people characterized by such busyness and waste, punctuating the barbed tirade with, “Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy ... We live in an amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots that just don’t care.”
Our pursuit of what Rabbi Abraham Heschel calls “things of space” – 60-inch plasma HD TVs, the latest Smartphone, a new car and every other clichéd consumable item you can think of – has left us exhausted, burned out by our own materialistic pursuits and excessive sense of entitlement.
We don’t even have time to sleep or exercise.
It’s left us with a rising suicide rate among young people, distressing levels of isolation and a general listlessness that define us as a generation.
Maybe Allen Moore’s Comedian has it right – when asked amid death, rubble and blood, “What happened to the American dream?” he responds, “This is it.”
In his book “The Sabbath,” Heschel suggests a possible remedy to our problem. He writes that we must “lay down the profanity of clattering commerce … go away from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling [our] own [lives]. [We] must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man … Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.”
Maybe the problem facing our culture, the problem that McKnight-Eily, Wiethorn and Louis C.K. are all describing, is that simple.
We’ve forgotten how to rest. We spend our time accumulating things and then think that “rest” simply means spending time with the things we’ve accumulated – watching TV late into the night, reading the latest fad blog, or watching the latest video to go viral on YouTube.
But that isn’t rest, it’s simply being idle. There’s a difference. In rest, we are intentionally cultivating in ourselves a heart that is recharged and refreshed as we prepare to return to our six days of work that Heschel describes.
Rest comes when we unplug from the constant droning of our plastic culture, when we turn off the TV, the computer and whatever else distracts us and give to each other the gift of unhurried, focused time.
Rest comes when we spend time really seeing each other, letting our souls blend together and sing as we enjoy another day in the amazing world described in Louis C.K.’s rant. Then, rather than finding ourselves in a place of frantic busyness and discomfort, we find ourselves in Rochester - going back to nights of Eva Cassidy, hot tea and discussion around a wood stove with downtown Rochester glistening through the window.
We need our Rochesters, our west Lincoln parks, our reading chairs in the study, because ultimately, Cassidy is right. We’re all poor, wayfaring strangers searching for a place.
JAKE MEADOR IS A JUNIOR ENGLISH AND HISTORY MAJOR. REACH HIM AT JAKEMEADOR@DAILYNEBRASKAN.COM.
1 comments