By John Starke and Jena Starke, TGC. (Image: Unsplash)
In his Confessions, Augustine doubts we can really experience our present moment. Our objective “present” is merely an imperceptible moment with no duration. He believes our lived experiences are almost entirely built on the psychological tension of our past and future. How we experience our days is defined by how we relate to what’s happened and what’s coming. The heartache within a fallen world is that this tension defaults to regret about the past and worry about what’s coming rather than gratitude and hope.
By the end of each week, we look at what we didn’t get done or we did poorly, and the obligations and expectations coming. Regret and worry. How we often relate to our time only exacerbates this dynamic.
In our culture of achievement, time is optimized to squeeze out double the productivity with maximum efficiency. In our culture of well-being, we need time for self-improvement and self-enhancement. But time bears witness that our physical and mental decline outpaces our self-improvement strategies. Our successes don’t survive our death. Achievement culture manufactures new regrets by resetting the bar every week, and well-being culture manufactures new worries by making the self a project that’s never finished.
At some point, we all take something like a Sabbath. Some relief is needed. We practice self-care or self-medicate. We scroll mindlessly while at our jobs or institute a four-day workweek. As a friend of ours says, “Five beers on a Friday night is a world looking for Sabbath.” These secular Sabbaths provide means of escape but never healing.