Embrace Your Life by Enjoying Quiddity

The average American adult’s screen attention time is 47 seconds. Two decades ago, it was 150 seconds. The generational trend line looks grimmer. Gen Z averages nearly two hours per day on TikTok. The average video watch time is between 15 and 30 seconds. That comes to watching an average of more than 300 videos. Per day. On one app.

We can shake our heads and bemoan social media and “young people these days,” but without a theological grounding, we don’t have much basis for calling them to change. Life is often boring and painful. It’s full of disappointment and drudgery. Of course you’d want to escape that—people always have. Why not choose a relatively innocuous method of thumb-swiping over drugs, gangs, and unplanned pregnancies?

The good news is there’s a third option. C. S. Lewis found an alternate path to holistic enjoyment: What if real life is found in receiving and pondering . . . real life?

Quiddity

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis shares a story about his lifelong friend A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, who helped Lewis develop attentiveness:

Jenkin seemed to be able to enjoy everything; even ugliness. I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic [detached and somewhat condescending] irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one’s nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was.

This is a Copernican transformation. What if the baking asphalt, gleaming aluminum, and thick exhaust of your 5:11 p.m. traffic jam isn’t a time to catch up on texts but to delight in your stuckness, your community of solitary drivers, and both the immutability and omnipresence of God? What if the monotonous flatness of this moment is a training ground for learning to discover texture?

Quiddity means the “thatness” of something. Your house is in that neighborhood rather than another. Your spouse is wearing that shirt. You’re sitting in that chair with that view to eat that meal. Notice and appreciate that, instead of sinking into your phone because that isn’t enough.

Develop Depth: Gratitude and Attentiveness

How do you become a deep person? You can hear it in the word itself—it’s the desire to mine, uncover, excavate. That doesn’t happen in 14 seconds. One method, then, is through reading great books, but it’s not the only way. Lewis presents a method available to any person at any point in his or her day—practicing attentiveness.

What if real life is found in receiving and pondering . . . real life?

Start by giving thanks. Give thanks for everything: The people around you at this moment. The floor under your feet, the seat under your rear, the voices or white noise washing around you, the work you’re taking a break from right now.

Giving thanks does two things for you. First and most important, you’re giving thanks to someone. In the act of thanksgiving, you’re made aware of more than an unfeeling, random universe. A Creator God made you and orchestrated the specifics of the world around you at this specific moment. He weaved them all together so you might delight in your surroundings and worship him for them.

Second, giving thanks causes you to reflexively think about why: Why is there goodness to this person, place, or thing? You know God is good, which means his goodness can be found in everything. It then becomes a matter of tracing the sunbeam up to the sun. Gratitude births attentiveness. Cynicism and entitlement destroy it.

If you’re writing an email, consider why that action is good. God has made the person receiving it. God has made words and communication. He’s given you the presence of mind in the moment to put your thoughts into words. You get to reflect God’s desire to share his mind and heart; to address and build up people he relates to.

My Attempt

I started this article one week into a winter inversion in Boise, Idaho. Clouds get stuck in the bowl of mountains we live in and everyone walks around sober-hungover from the merciless gray. Perfect. I’d challenge Lewis to find something more dismal and dripping.

How do you become a deep person? You can hear it in the word itself—it’s the desire to mine, uncover, excavate.

I stared at the heavy, depressed sky and didn’t flinch. What does God want me to see? I started giving thanks that “joy comes with the morning” (Ps. 30:5).

Knowing that doesn’t only help in the morning, though. It helps in the gray and the waiting. There’s something sweet about the pang of expectation, waiting for a certain event at an uncertain time (Lam. 3:26). I was thankful for God’s steadfastness. His grace and promises aren’t contingent on how I feel them. When clouds cover the sky, the sun is still there. God’s favor, grace, and love are still working even when they’re obscured.

I wanted to go further. It’s not merely hope for sunshine that connects me with God. God is good in clouds and gray. It’s good to feel quiet and subdued before God. “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa. 30:15). God breathes through the ordinary stillness of life, as well as in the times of exuberant radiance. We need seasons of being laid low. We need reminders to walk in submission to God with our mouths still and our ears open so we can receive his strength.

That’s how God met me in the thatness of a Boise winter. God wants to meet you in the thatness of whatever specific moment you’re in as well. Be attentive and give thanks. Live more by focusing on where you are.

News Source : https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/live-more-enjoy-quiddity/