Notifications frequently disturb us as we are doing any task.  Recently, a friend of mine was complaining about how one of his friends sent him a message and its notification woke him up in the middle of the night.  I thought to myself why hadn’t he simply turned off his phone or silenced the notifications from that app in the late night?

Also, I was in church recently, and I saw a person in front of me on his cell phone the entire service.  He did not stop texting on his phone from the moment I got there up until the service was over.  He was not a youngling either.  I do not know why he was texting the whole time, but I felt pity for him; he clearly did not have perception of where he was because of this; he lost out on the experience of being present in his place.

Both these stories reflect the disturbances and interruptions of life that instant notifications often cause.

If we continue paying attention to our notifications as and when they go off, then we will experience five losses that will become regular parts of our lives:

“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” –Blaise Pascal

We live in days where we are constantly surrounded by noise: the demands of family, friends, or roommates; television commercials; or the sound of music as a background to anything we do whether we are at the gym, are completing work, or even going to sleep.

Fewer things are more abominable to us than having nothing to do on a Friday night or Saturday.  All this shows how we want to be around noise.  In fact, not being around noise is a scary thing for us.  Just watch any person who seems to be waiting for someone to come or something to happen; he or she immediately goes to his or her cell phone and checks status updates or goes straight to a game on the phone.  This is a type of mental noise.

This is because, sometimes, silence is deafening.  Silence is deafening because our thoughts begin working and processing our lives in silence.  We often do not want to hear these thoughts in the silence, but this is where stillness comes in (stillness is the older way of referring to having a state of silence).

The quote above from Blaise Pascal, who was not only a scientist, but a philosopher and a theologian too, grasps the origin of a multitude of problems, which is the fact we do not have the ability to be silent, or have stillness.

Stillness helps us solve many problems.  Still water reflects a clear image, but stirred up water cannot.  In the same way, when we are still, we have clarity, but when we are stirred up, we do not have clarity.

Below are three ways of practicing stillness and benefitting from it:

Picture © Daniel Hanna 2013

“Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.” -Adam Hochschild

I attended an IMAX theater for the first time to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

I had already seen it in a regular theater one time before, but I wanted to go see it in IMAX.  I went with two people, and one of them was looking at his phone during the movie to the point that he was missing out on the movie.  It was also this person’s first time seeing this movie or any Star Wars film for that matter, so I told him to get off the phone and watch the movie.  The result was that he really enjoyed the movie, and he even called me the following day to talk about the movie and IMAX.

This got me thinking about how easy it is for us to be distracted through phones, texts, apps, and social media.  While distraction has always been a problem for humanity, it is now much easier, in fact, the easiest it has ever been for humans to be distracted.

Distractions affect us in three ways:

“One moment of patience may ward off great disaster. One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.” -Chinese Proverb

“Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.” –Plautus

In our digital age, many actions are done with a couple of clicks: purchasing, updating statuses, checking texts, texting ready-made replies to others, and so on.  Unlike before the digital age, most of the ways we interact and do things have changed being mainly on computer or telephone, and this change has made it easier for us to become impatient.  It’s not that we have all of a sudden become impatient; rather, our impatience has become more apparent from using digital technology for interaction and doing things.  We expect people to reply to texts, to like statuses, and to help us in stores immediately (which causes us to come across as rude) as we expect computers or phones to allow us to perform actions quickly.

This is an extreme drawback because patience helps us in several ways.

Picture © Daniel Hanna 2013

“Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” -Acts 20:35

Merry Christmas!

It is that time of year when Santa Claus brings gifts to well behaved children, and you see the jolly old elf in a bright red suit sitting in malls and children lining up to talk to him.  However, we have lost sight on the original person on whom Santa Claus is based.

Santa painting used to illustrate
Clement C. Moore’s poem “The Night Before Christmas”

The name Santa Claus (Sinterklaas) is Dutch for Saint Nicholas, Claus being the nickname of Nicholas in Dutch speaking countries much like Nick is in America.

The saint on whom the modern Santa Claus is based, Saint Nicholas, lived in the late 3^rd to the mid 4^th Century during times of both persecution of Christians and later, in peaceful times.  He was the bishop of a city called Myra in Asia Minor.

Value is the reason we pursue anything.

Value is determined by scarcity. In every category of life, there is scarcity, whether it is money, time, supply of items, friendship, community, or education.  Scarcity, especially the scarcity of good things in our lives, determines what we hold to be important in our lives and how we value others, ideas, and objects.

Think about this: how many times have you heard others say they have objects that they say have “a sentimental value,” to them.  This could be a photo album of the family or a gift from a loved one.  The reason such an object has so much value is because it is a one of a kind; there is nothing else like it due to the way and from whom they received such an object.

So, how can we keep the good things in our lives valuable?

“Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities to blessings.” –William Arthur Ward

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, many Americans have begun referring to his holiday as Turkey Day.  However, let’s bring back the focus of this holiday: thankfulness.  Thankfulness has three effects.

“It took us only 10,000 [years] to make knowing obsolete.” –Sugata Mitra

In the past 10,000 years humans have moved from solely conversing through speech to conversing through writing, and not only to writing, but to having the majority of Western people reading and writing, and not only to the majority of Western people reading and writing, but text is now available digitally and can be accessed from the cloud by virtually everyone, wherever that cloud may be.

For these reasons, having knowledge is no longer as important as knowing how to find it, but this also highlights a great responsibility: If knowledge is available to us, then it is our responsibility to access it, learn from it, and apply it for the benefit of others and us.  James the Apostle says in his Epistle, “To him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin” (James 4:17).  If we take this mindset, then we discover four things about knowledge in the 21^st Century that may have missed our notice:

“A good character is the best tombstone.  Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered.  Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.” –Charles Spurgeon

Good character is something that has been lacking in every generation.  However, it is the driving force for all good effects in every single endeavor.

There are five aspects to good character, and we should all strive to have these qualities:

We live in a time when reading forms the basis of our civilization.

Think about this for a moment.

If you are a businessman, doctor, engineer, professor, scientist, teacher, student, lawyer, police officer, mayor, or administrator, the majority of your work begins in some type of reading.  It could be a quarterly report, a patient’s records, a site plan, a dissertation, curriculum, an essay, rap sheet, report, city council minutes, or other type of report.  The list is endless!  Reading is the basis and beginning of all these professions.

Some may wonder, “What if I choose a job as a cashier, custodian, burger-flipper, or gas station worker?”  Regardless, you still have to read.  McDonald’s, for example, has a manual that its employees read that explains the procedures of the restaurant and the way employees are to carefully perform their job.  A custodian has plans to read that inform him how to clean and organize the place where he works.  Reading is unavoidable.  This type of reading is necessary and important therefore it is the moral duty of parents and teachers to ensure that their children are able to read adequately, but the above mentioned type of reading frequently does not add to our personal growth as much as a second type of reading.

There is a second type of reading that is increasingly becoming neglected in society and that is reading for inspiration, inspiration that leads to growth, knowledge, and experience.  This is the type of reading that the people who founded all the fields above, (and who were extremely successful) engaged in, and this type of reading helped them think creatively to lead to beneficial innovation.  Such people include revolutionary scientists as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and the Founding Fathers of the United States.  The list is enormous.