Tapering: pacing ourselves instead of being paced

the monthly letter

Not too far into my marriage, I discovered Half Price Books — and not for the reason most do. I wasn’t yet hunting down used copies of out-of-print books but instead looking for a way to make some extra cash on the dowry Nate brought into our marriage. We’d now lugged boxes and boxes of his literature and poetry anthologies and yellowed-paged classics across two moves.

Surely, I could free up space and make some extra cash by purging these.

Considering this to be resourceful – Proverbs 31-woman-ish, if you will – I didn’t ask permission but proudly toted bagloads of books into the local Half Price Books store. I handed over the bags and grabbed a chai from next door before shopping the shelves, imagining all the cash I’d have to burn.

I left the store about thirteen dollars and thirty-seven cents richer. Actually, I paid an extra $2 for the one book I thrifted from the shelf, for which the money I’d made on the something-like 67 books I brought in didn’t cover.

I got home, and Nate was furious, not congratulatory, for my having “created space in our basement storage”. These books weren’t used college textbooks as I imagined. They had shaped him. Some keep photo albums to tell the story of their childhood. Nate kept books.

Our lives, of late, have grown in increasing intensity. We love our full home and all these people — and yet (intimately) know the sweat it takes to restore the hearts of the once-fatherless while simultaneously feeding and tending to seven young bodies and hearts.

Not to mention that the world got thrown out of orbit in 2020 and still reels. I still get honks and angry gestures regularly while driving (to which Nate might say is due to my driving rather than the cultural climate, but you’ll trust my assessment, right?). Most everyone in my world is frayed, tired, and spent. The information that comes my way via texts, voxer, social media, email, and the news — in one day — could sink even the spryest from 30 years ago.

We are a pressed people, feeling the push of life on every side. Bone-tired. We have little left, and yet, tomorrow will require more than today for each of us.

The first things to go when pressed are often the things that matter most. When life presses in, I crave carbs and sugar, skim the fat off my sleep, scroll mindlessly, and task as if it’s my main priority. And more than a few weeks or months of being pressed and letting the best things fade builds habits into our lives and minds.

Friends, we’ve been building crisis-mode habits for years, and it seems that the crisis of the world tilt might not relent. (And some of our life crises may not concede either.)

Enter learning — abstract, for-the-fun-of-it learning. Reading poetry on a rainy afternoon, sitting in the stillness of fall, listening for bird calls, and falling asleep to a novel, or checking a book out of the library written by a Christian who lived and died with their faith 100 years ago.

It seems to be such an abstract concept for a time when our Chipotle and Chick-fIl-A dinners are at their height. Such a strange thing to consider when we’re accustomed to listening to messages and podcasts at double speed.

What’s the benefit of John Donne or Elisabeth Elliott or Lillias Trotter when I haven’t had a minute to get my oil changed?

I’m telling myself, as I’m telling you – the world’s pace isn’t relenting. I need to set my own pace, or I will squander the beauty available to me from God. 

C.S. Lewis said in a sermon he preached in 1939 titled Learning in Wartime:

“To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues [every moment advancing either to heaven or hell], but not under the shadow of a European war, would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.”

Our dusty bookshelves and our AirPods — how we freeze while scanning the horizon to find a mentor to speak into our lives but can easily repost a meme with manufactured passion — reveal that our cliff notes lifestyles, if not challenged, exclude us from some of the beauty God gives during the pressing, in the intensity.

The irony of how I sold all those books away is that I, too, was raised on reading. The swivel chair in our sunroom holds some of my favorite childhood memories. It hid me from the world and my siblings, as I spun it towards our backyard and got lost in a book. Every year on Christmas Eve, I stayed up through the night — sometimes until 2 or 3 in the morning — reading a new book I’d gotten for Christmas. It was my tradition that I’m not sure my parents even noticed.

But when I started walking with God, I left behind my love for literature. No one taught me this, but somehow I had received that Lucy Pevensie and Dickon Sowerby were antithetical to growth in God. If I read, it was to be purely didactic. I boxed up my novels, too.

I ran hard during those days, and some of those same muscles are ones I use still use today to endure long days, big hearts, and all the needs. And yet, two years past the world tilt, I’m realizing: I have a choice that might best be made right now:

I can read poetry at 3:45 in the afternoon, even for five minutes.

I can choose a Daily Office, a guided scriptural prayer.

I can reach out to a mentor a dozen years older than me and ask her to teach me what I don’t know about how to thrive during challenging times.

I can steal page-long increments of A Tale of Two Cities during the craziest week of my fall.

I can be a student again … yes, even in wartime.

But first, I have to choose.

{We dive deeper into topics like this each week in my smaller, more shoulder-to-shoulder writing space, SOAR.}

“If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun.” – CS Lewis again, Learning in Wartime.

Until next month,

Sara