I’ll never forget the moment my parents realized that John was missing. All the sounds and sights of the amusement park blurred into the background with one sudden stab of fear: my little brother was gone.
My family grabbed each other’s hands and, fighting off panic, pushed our way through the crowds to the lost children center, where, with a wave of relief, we found him safe and sound.
This story–thankfully one with a happy ending–came to mind recently when I noticed that my attention has been acting like a distracted child more and more, getting lost in my crushing, increasingly crowded head. Where am I? I’ve often caught myself thinking. While I’m standing in the middle of the house, my mind is ten rabbit trails away, and I’ve got to retrieve my own attention by chasing it down and sometimes wrestling it back like a runaway toddler. I’m increasingly forgetful, disoriented, and then angry with myself and full of regret for what truly deserved my undivided focus but only got a wisp of attention.
In other words, I’m struggling to stay: stay with a thought, a task, a conversation, a schedule.
I say yes to an invitation to travel and speak rather than staying true to my commitment to staying home in a particularly demanding season.
I open a new document rather than returning to one of the other five projects frozen indefinitely between “this is a great idea” and “publish.”
I spend half an hour scrolling through other people’s European pilgrimages, home remodels, health journeys, and business opportunities rather than attending to back-to-school shopping and bill paying.
And the root of the problem, I think, is a wandering listlessness, a sort-of browsing of the surface-level aisles of distraction or ideation for something “better” or at least “other.” Something else. Then the task at hand cries out for me, and I’m shaken awake, forced to retrieve all the missing parts of myself that have faces pressed up against other people’s windows. Oh, if I only I could let this restless part of me be loved back into stillness and stability.
I’m not the first or only one with this “staying” problem, of course. Eve turned her eyes from everything she had to the one thing she didn’t. She reached for something else. And as an unhappy result, we all find ourselves on a journey back home, urged on by the sense of restlessness that keeps us both moving toward God and, when unchecked, running away from exactly where He is: the present moment.
It is the present moment that demands all of me and deserves all of me. And perpetually half-finished isn’t holy. We are made in the image and likeness of a God who begins good things and follows through, carrying them through to completion (Philippians 1:6). But in this fallen world and in my fallen state, it will require repeated acts of recollection to tame the restlessness–until, as St. Augustine reminds us, we rest in God.
Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. – St. Augustine
The space between “restlessness” and “rest in thee”, the until, is not a passive kind of waiting around for peace. We are not powerless here. The virtues of restraint and diligence are things won through self-discipline and right-ordering living, lots of praying, and seeking–not of a surface-level scanning or desperate grasping–but earnest discernment of what is our next right thing. It is putting ourselves in front of the Blessed Sacrament, over and over, in spite of our busy minds and patchwork lives, naming our struggles: distraction, acedia, daydreaming, envy, idle curiosity, and then asking for help. (After all, having agency does not mean we must go at it alone!)
Some things I’ve found helpful are:
- Focal practices, a term I discovered in Arthur Boers’ book, Living into Focus. These are activities that anchor us to our real lives, our embodied selves, to creation, and to God. Walking, painting, sculpting, cooking, playing, swimming. Anything that cultivates our particular patch of the garden, including our bodies. These activities are not distractions from real life; they are real life, and they keep us focused without our even realizing it because they are both enjoyable and challenging. They seem to suspend time and make us forget for a moment that we are perpetually looking for something.
- A schedule, made possible and doable with a daily planner. I find that I need a paper planner. The tangible nature of it, the activity of putting pen to paper, is itself a focal practice, and a necessary one. I also find that I work best in sets of three: three months of planning, three goals for a season, three days of dinner plans, three “must-dos” a day. (Is this a coincidence, since we are made in the image of a Trinitarian God? I think not.) It may be a relief to remember that opportunities and interests aren’t bad; they just need to be ordered and prioritized. Each moment cannot exist as a menu of equally appetizing alternatives. “The modern world,” said Pope John Paul II, “boasts of the enticing door which says: everything is permitted. It ignores the narrow gate of discernment and renunciation.” That’s true with our big life decisions but also in the daily choices that allow us to be faithful to them. A schedule and planner are indispensable tools as we navigate this narrow way.
- Accountability is essential. We want to limit the something else that keeps us distracted, but we should not limit the someone else whose job is to remind us of our calling and our prior commitments and to speak clarity into the muddy waters of our busy minds. Earlier this year I started a mastermind group for Catholic women who wanted to make greater progress in their writing, and simply knowing that every other week we were going to see each other lit a fire in us. I finished a book project that had taken years to complete, and I don’t know if I could have done it without their encouragement.
- Recognizing and honoring fatigue – this is so hard, but so important. I’m always going to choose what’s easy and distracting when I’m tired–physically or emotionally. Often the best choice is to take a nap or choose an early bedtime so that the next day I can begin again, fresh and ready for the new graces prepared by God (Lamentations 3:23). Resting and “remain in me” are tied together.
- Finally but most importantly, the discipline of daily prayer. Staying begins here; restlessness ends here. Staying with the daily readings and the prayer of the Church. Staying with our sacramental and devotional commitments. Staying with the Eucharist.
But let’s stop here and remind ourselves of the “let yourself” part of this whole process.
Because eventually we’ll realize we are too broken to do this totally on our own, even in the company of others. The Lord will let us run around with our collection basket, gathering up the bits of us left all the places we’ve wandered each day. He will let us–He wants us to– schedule, and rest, and rightly order ourselves, all the way to the point where we realize we’ve done all we can, and we’re still distracted, restless, and often lost.
What it comes down to is this: not in conquering our ache for something else and the human tendency to wander off to find it, but in letting ourselves be found.
We can be the parents pushing through the crowd only for so long. Eventually, we become the lost child who looks up to see his parents opening the door to bring him home. “Do not move about from house to house,” He says tenderly (Luke 10:7). And we drop our little distractions and leave behind the altar of alternatives. We take the Father’s hand with repentance, docility, and trust. We let ourselves follow–and fall in love with–His will as it is revealed in the present moment.
And we let our restless selves be loved.