Why Learning to Brake is Culture Recovery
Probing some philosophical questions about speed
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
These lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” transfixed me as a teenager, and even though I had little idea of what they meant, I could not get their mesmerizing interplay out of my head, so I semi-memorized them, putting them into a poetry journal I still have. “The Hollow Men,” more famous for its final lines: “This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a whimper,” has fallen into an obscurity it doesn’t deserve, because the poem communicates—at least to me—the practical way that fallenness—our fallen human nature—works. Between our desire to do something and its action “Falls the Shadow” of our selfish, inadequate, broken-viewed, distortion of reality—there is always the taint of sin. In a world obsessed with the power in the works of our hands, a world blind to the possibility of this relentless sin or error—this ignorance is catastrophic, as the poem spells out.
Given that the Shadow will always Fall between our potency and our existence, between the motion and the act, one blessing that God gives us is slowing us down and frustrating our desires. Given that our desires, especially those that seem so noble and good and pure are forever shifted off course, even by only one fraction of a degree, the lovingkindness of God puts brakes on our actions so that we are not so quickly able to destroy ourselves or others. Slowing us down gives us time to think, to reflect, to change course, to at least pray and submit the work to God.
In this light, speed is not a blessing. The instantaneous gratification of desires is something we humans both indulge and inherently suspect, as we should. We are happy we can watch a show with the push of a button, and then regret that we wasted so much time doing so. We one-click order the gadget on Prime, then are irate at the bills and the junk in our home. Ironically I think speed leads to the Shadow falling more heavily over our actions, and thus having more influence over our lives, not less.
Give that this is the state of affairs, the problem of the homemaker and the house-man and the parent is to how to gratuitously slow down all these transactions, especially the ones that might quickly lead to destruction and addiction. So much of homemaking is the arranging of actions, the preparation of the environment. You want the productive actions done more easily and with less friction—hence the bowl of fruit on the counter for breakfasting or easy snacking, while the sugary treats are unbought, or hidden away to delay their being consumed. You want to slow down the actions that can be timewasters or corrupting, and construct a broad and easy way towards the productive and positive actions.
This is why my husband and I have never owned a television. From the time I was a small child, I disliked the technology and could not explain why. Ironically in college I ended up majoring in Communications with a concentration in Radio/Television, so my dislike is not based on ignorance—in fact, studying television only convinced me that I never ever wanted to work in it. Now, at the age of 54, I can articulate why I specifically dislike that technology: it’s not so much the content as it is the speed.
Televisions operate with the click of a button, and then the options are there, whether via the old-school operations of twisting a dial or the new-fangled point-and-click. It’s too fast! There’s no time to consider whether you actually should be or even want to watch something—the glowing screen appears and has your attention.
So learning to apply the brakes to our actions judiciously has been an important part of our parental preparation of the home environment, as well as a foundation for our marriage communication. For example, instead of one of us making a quick decision the other spouse is likely to resent, we have learned to say, “We’ll talk about it later”—and then make sure we do. We’ve learned to not hit send on the message or the email, and often just delete, lest the emotionally-charged response live on in hyperspace to maim or wound. My husband refuses to move to a smart phone, having been convinced by witnessing multiple avoidable situations that the technology is too fast for his quick temper to handle. As deafness closes in on me, I have learned to not raise my voice to yell “What?” when I can’t hear, but to stop whatever I’m doing and move closer to the person trying to talk to me. For me, raising my voice means raising my emotion, and my emotions don’t dial down easily (I wish I had noticed this about myself back when I was herding small children).
But I have begun to see that intentionally stepping away from speed is part of a broader swath of culture recovery. For instance, homesteading can be seen as a way of choosing to doing things more slowly. Instead of rushing to the grocery store or app for eggs, having to go out to the coop to see if the hens are done laying. This is very much inconvenient most of the time, although the superior quality of our free-range eggs more than makes up for it. We have had to ration eggs during the winter months in order to be sure to have them when we need them. We also choose to put off buying pork or beef until a designated animal has been sent to slaughter. The organic meat is completely worth it, but it requires more planning, delays gratification, and slows things down. We have not yet been able to make the transition to only obtaining produce from our garden. Part of it is the learning curve, but part of it is that plants are slow! Super slow!
You see, I am an impatient person: I don’t prefer the slow. I like quick decisions, rapid accomplishments, one-and-done, and always moving forward. For me, the virtue of slowness and steadiness is not as easy to appreciate as it is for others. Since I am so fickle and sanguine, I have not yet managed to grow the fresh salad greens I require for my daily consumption—fresh salad is a must for me at our table. My gardening friends for whom patience is as easy as breathing may laugh at me, but although I am learning, I definitely have not figured out the rhythm of plant life. Still I have hopes that through learning some patience and maybe figuring out cold frames, I might actually be able to accomplish growing my own lettuce year round as some do. For now, I am grateful for the modern grocery supply chain.
For us, homesteading was never just a way to “achieve independence” or cut ourselves off from a tainted modern world: it was mostly a way to force ourselves to slow down to a more sane way of life. I am also a person who loves cities: New York City dwells deep in my heart, and when I first stepped off the train in Rome, Italy years ago and took a deep breath of the smell of smoke and people and filled my ears with its sounds of insane traffic and shouts in a staccato of languages, I instinctively thought, “I am home!” Given that this is who I am, I have been puzzled why I and almost everyone I know, save the most hardened inner-city dwellers, has a fascinated attraction and even a yearning for farming, gardening, homesteading, or some kind of rural life. Sure, we love our Costcos and big box stores and fast cars and smartphones, but why do so many of us wax eloquent about the Shire or fixate on Tasha Tudor or dream about the Amish? Including those of us who have no strong love for animals and who actively enjoy urbanity? Why this dissatisfaction with the world we have so energetically created? What are we missing?
I am going to put my finger on our ambivalent relationship with speed as the problem.
We dream of speed—of flying, of rushing over impassable terrain, of zooming in, of soaring high, of building big, of mowing down obstacles, of leaping over buildings and problems like Superman. “The need for speed” is our mantra—but yet we resent it. Too much is lost in the blur. “Rushing towards nowhere” has become a thing. When we pause, we sway internally as our mind rushes forward, eradicating peace in the static of hopping over endless tiny hurdles, even when it’s time for sleep. Speed can be a curse if you lose the ability to slow down.
Rural life is inherently slow. Leaning into the needs of crops and animals—needing to water, to feed, to nurture on a time schedule that is not of your own choosing—to live with and in a world—the natural world—which is stubbornly resistant or impervious to speed. Nothing is more frustratingly slow than a seed. Many animals seem to love speed as much as we do, as anyone who’s taken a dog for a ride in a car knows. They certainly are impatient to have their needs satisfied and are as subject to the vagaries of desire as we are, but their desires are fortunately mostly relatable and limited. Plants are completely opaque, at least to me. Their timetable is firmly not ours, and can rarely be cajoled, only respected and worked with. Same with the weather, which changes regardless of our efforts to control or predict it. This is why I believe rural life haunts our imaginations: it beckons us to bind ourselves to something with an increasingly alien timetable of slow growth—slowth, if I may term it—so slow it speaks only in syllables of eternity.
If you homestead, you can’t always be away from home driving places in the car. You’ve got to be back for feeding time, or if you have dairy animals, milking time. Certain times of the year, you’ve got to drop everything and work intensely to meet the needs of the crops. You plant now, in a certain window, or you don’t plant this year. You weed now, or take the loss. So often I have been grateful for the backup of stores when my best-laid plans ganged aft agley.
But to move more slowly, you need not homestead or raise animals or plants for food. You can bind yourself to other slow-moving systems to force yourself to slow down. For many retirees, following the Liturgy of the Hours—pedaling through set prayers during Morning, Midmorning, Noon, Mercy Hour, Evening, and Night throughout the day, whether by using the official Church liturgies or the briefer Magnificat—is the solution to slowing down. We busy workers and parents can emulate this by praying when we rise, an Angelus at noon, Divine Mercy Chaplet at three, Angelus before family dinner, prayers before bed, and fitting in a Rosary somewhere in between. The prayer is a pause, a way to slowly apply the brakes, stop the mental hurdle racing, and still the soul, at least for a few minutes, if not hours.
Distributism, Chestertonian economics, is another way of slowing down the frenetic economic activity, as I’ve mentioned here. This is true even if you are not a economist or business owner but only a lowly consumer. As I said in one of my first posts, adopting parameters for shopping has helped me slow down and think about where I buy. Avoiding goods made by slave labor is easier if you renounce speed in favor of justice: boycotts are easier if you are willing to wait and even forego. My living in a small town which has escaped “development” because the county leaders decided they wanted to take it slow means there are few options for shopping for say, new clothes, outside of Walmart and Target. Belonging to a church and a co-op is a blessing because the families involved regularly offer one another giveaway clothing. There are also a few excellent thrift stores run by charities that regularly cycle through enough brand name and designer clothing to keep my family both clothed and satisfied. But shopping at thrift stores means you often have to put your needs on a list and wait for things to appear. You have to apply the brakes to your desires, but often that means the desire involves an adventure instead of an easily-sated one-click-shop. And sometimes if you choose to do without what you think you need, you find that need evaporates and you’ve saved your time and money.
If a society were set on doing economics so that individuals, families and small places benefitted, Chestertonian economics could work. Just more slowly. And at least where I live, the general consumer milieu acknowledges that “shopping small” is great when you can do it, and most people don’t mind.
Merely living in a small town, away from the distractions, entertainments, and energy of the city and the suburbs is another way of forcing yourself to do things more slowly, to stay home and go without. Dropping your Netflix or Amazon prime subscription, as we just did, is another way to slow things down. If things cost more, it’s definitely more inconvenient, and might just make you pause and reflect. Another form of inconvenience is to make yourself go out to that concert or local play instead of staying home with a movie or video game. The latter is easier and faster: but the other is often more worthwhile.
Forming taste is a restraint. And diets are also a restraint, putting the brakes on the most basic of instincts: hunger. Requiring yourself to forgo junk food or sugar in order to focus on foods that are more difficult to acquire but more healthy and satisfying is a way of slowing down. Renouncing buying any sugary treats at the store in favor of baking your own is another way of slowing yourself down, without letting go of sugar altogether. Or forgoing the Sam’s Club membership and pre-packaged meals or restaurant food to help yourself or your children master cooking is another way to slow down, or to just put obstacles between yourself and excess food so that you have to work, think, and choose. Fasting, whether the religious or intermittent kind, is the supreme method of slowing down.
If you think about it, even politeness is a slowing down. Formality is restraint. It means often thinking before you speak, not saying the insult or rude comment that springs to your lips, reining in the expletive to avoid shock or blasphemy. Etiquette means ordering your relationships, consulting others, and again, spouses and families communicating.
Merely paying attention often requires slowing down. Turning off the phone, watching without distractions, biking instead of driving, walking instead of biking is all braking in order to slow down the soul and make our movements more intentional and more meaningful. That this benefits relationships, the environment, culture, and society in general is just another win. Attentiveness is braking.
But yet we need technology. And here we need to apply some strategy.
I actually love computers: and here I freely acknowledge that I would never have become a writer without one. As a child, I had written stories longhand for years and was constantly frustrated, because my method was and is to constantly revise. Even now, I’ve backspaced and rewritten quite a bit on this very article as I reword my initial thought as soon as I see it on the page. The Apple Macintosh was an epiphany for me because it made writing easy, for the first time.
So I have always made sure to have a working computer on hand since 1992, but my relationship with the internet has been more wary. Convenience is good but again, the speed is troubling. Let me look at just one aspect of speed: entertainment. We love having the miniseries based on the works of Austen and Dickens at our fingertips—but there’s so much else frothing forth as well that we emphatically do not want. Plus, as my mother in-law starkly put it, “Do we want our children watching good things or doing good things?” We all, especially children, need less screen time, not more.
So to deal with the temptation to constantly watch, our strategy has always been: we don’t have a television. We have a computer that must be booted up, passwords typed in, and—here is a key thing—the furniture in the room must be rearranged as well in order to watch a movie.
This has made watching a movie not an automatic de-stresser but an event in our home. First the parents have to give permission, because only the parents and a few responsible older children know the password to said computer. This means we have to think about homework assignments, whether the kitchen has been cleaned, or if there is something else that would be better to do, like playing a board game. It’s a group consultation, and the liturgical year puts on another layer of constraints: there are no movies during Lent or Advent, or only religious ones, and then only on Sundays and feast days.
Once all these hurdles have been cleared, the computer is booted up, the internet connection is checked (we deliberately are slow about upgrading)—and at my husband’s insistence, night prayer booklets are brought out first and prayed accordingly. Also, when available, popcorn is popped on the stove and buttered and salted, seltzer water is made, with a splash of schnapps to flavor the adult glasses, chips are opened and put in bowls, and the couch is moved from the fireplace area to the computer (without scratching the floor), and chairs positioned, the lights are put out—and then the movie commences.
That constitutes a whole series of brakes on our pleasure, and the result? Our children LOVE movies. They watch them intently, they laugh, they cry—they watch avidly and discuss it afterwards fervently. They comment on the acting, the storytelling, the artistic whole. Sometimes we have other children or teens over to watch movies, and it has struck me through the years that those raised in houses where the television or a video perpetually available just don’t really enjoy movies as much. Their attention wanders, they chatter, they get up and walk away, they pull out their phones and check out—it’s ironic. So perhaps by slowing the process down, our family has actually recovered the experience of watching movies.
One of my adult daughters points out that a big part of this equation was that my husband and I watched movies WITH our children. Part of this was Montessori in nature: you teach your children how to do an activity by doing it with them. And part of it was certainly being a good parent, ready to stop our children from being slimed by terrifying or pornified images. As children who were raised on TV, my husband and I had plenty of images we ourselves wished to forget. But the largest reason for always watching shows with our children was to form their taste by giving them many things to love and appreciate. If a show is boring to us, why should we let our children watch it? Far better to lead them into enjoying something that at first glance is not attractive to them, even if it takes a bit of time and sustained energy on the part of the parent.
(Tip: We also have used and taught our children the five-minute test. Give a show five minutes and then pause. If you hate the beginning, you will probably hate the ending. This is because most movies are written so that the ending deliberately mirrors the beginning.)
But when screens are used as babysitters, often children watch movies without their parents, and thus may see many things that are frankly shoddy, boring, patronizing, or even confusing and harmful. My daughter points out children miss out on learning some very important skills because of it. When parents and children discover a movie together, the experience is different. Children can become aware of the adult reactions—smiles, laughter, questions, the moments when we became deeply immersed, or the moments where we back away and click off the screen, saying, “It’s not worth your time.” In short, parents help children to appreciate shows—or to indicate what is not worth appreciating.
We try not to mock movies, even bad ones. Appreciation is a difficult skill: critique is easy and has to be restrained. We’ve tried to teach our children that making fun of a movie is first of all, rude— it destroys the experience for others. Plus, it’s easy to mock—you can do it just about anything—and it’s difficult to snap out of it. Lastly, life is short, and I just can’t see the point of wasting two hours or more mocking something. Better to leave, or just turn it off. Do we want our children watching good things or doing good things? What should we be doing ourselves? If a show’s only virtue is that it’s “inoffensive,” wouldn’t a kid be better off playing with mud in the backyard?
But of course, part of parenting is teaching them the skill of navigating media and learning how to think critically, how to say no. Temptations will vary from person to person, from teen to teen, but parents who know their children well can usually judge what each can handle. We have always made time to watch particular shows with our older children: not every movie is “family friendly,” nor should it be. I do think it’s important that teens learn about genres, so that girls can learn how to appreciate war movies and young men can learn how to sit through the A&E Pride and Prejudice with enjoyment.
When it comes to movies—or food—or taste—or shopping—or any of the things we’ve been discussing, our goal is not to create snobs but humans who can fully enjoy the good, true, and beautiful. And often this means, slowing down and denying our frantic “need for speed.” That means putting brakes on quick technology, setting up obstacles to allow us to reflect, learning to fast, learning to observe, whether that means homesteading or praying more or some other structure to tether our fleeting spirits to so that we can learn again to live. Maybe in that way we can avoid the Shadow, or by braking, at least step towards the light.
It’s worth a shot.
PS: My daughter caught me writing this article, which brought up a host of shared memories of watching shows together and invariably we began to list our all-time favorites. Since I know Catholic parents often discover shows by hearing about them from other families, here’s a list. Some of these movies were more educational than others—and I should mention that for years, I made my children sit through summer movie classes where we analyzed story and craft which may explain some entries. I put them in rough age order, with more adult movies towards the end: when a show has more than one version, I linked the ones we prefer:
Three Wishes for Cinderella, The Miracle Maker, Our Neighbor Totoro, The Incredibles, Cloak and Dagger, The Emperor’s New Groove, Ratatouille, A Night at the Opera (we love the Marx Brothers), Little Women, Bolt, The First Olympics, Akeela and the Bee, Jesus of Nazareth, The Ten Commandments, I Prefer Heaven, The Scarlet Pimpernel (must skip 2 scenes) Twelfth Night, Jane Eyre, Henry V, Swan Lake (there was the epic summer we watched nearly every online version: we linked to our favorite.) Babette’s Feast, Rear Window, The Lady Vanishes, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Bakhita, Ip Man, The Day of the Siege (sometimes called The Siege of Vienna), The Chosen, Doctor Thorne, Iphigenia, T-34, Charade, Frequency, and also all the obscure Charles Dickens series like Our Mutual Friend and Martin Chuzzlewit as well as the more recent Little Dorrit and Bleak House which have created a new generation of Dickens fans, at least in our home.