And the Pesky Fades Away

You’ve felt them, I’m sure. 

Little pricks of concern. Those worrisome wants that pester our minds the moment we wake. How will next week go? What do they think of me? Did I reply? No, I forgot. I suck, I’m the worst.

I would be terrified to see a yearly ledger of my time. How many hours have been lost swatting at the gnats of nonsense swirling in my head?

Time is our most precious gift. Everyone’s heard. But here’s the problem: while I constantly think about time’s tremendous value, my actions rarely reflect what I know to be true. I bleed away minutes to Internet distractions, then I drown further minutes in internal concern. Endless pondering of a detail, a text, a tiny fear about what may or may not happen. 

Call it “The Pesky.” 

Pesky, pesky, pesky. So much of my life is lost to the pesky. Trivial noise generated by my mind and amplified by my phone. Past generations at least took breaks. I’ll see them tomorrow. We’ll deal with it Monday. We find ourselves tethered to a blinking, beeping pesky machine that never skips an hour. Our world shrinks to a five-inch screen and a five-minute window, our time split into ever smaller shards.

What a waste! We’re the lucky few (billion) alive for the Internet Age. What a time. The world is ablaze with marvelous change, but only if you mute your mind and look around. Too often we miss our glorious present for pesky mental chatter. While a sky full of stars erupts overhead, we pass the hours flicking mud off our shoelaces. 

We become what we behold. Attend to the small, live a small life. In an uncertain world, of this I’m sure: I reject the small. I refuse to let my treasured hours splinter into empty fragments. I want to live a fulfilling life. A focused life. A life well spent.

That’s right: I want to live a life focused on the grand. Therefore I must dwell on the grand, not the pesky. Great writing, bold thinkers, exhilarating ideas that expand my world and stir my soul. There’s a rich buffet of calorie-dense information available every moment, and endless ways to meet others with shared enthusiasms, but only if we properly direct our attention. It’s so easy to fall back into the pesky.

This is our challenge. Can we treat our time like a glowing puddle we hold in our hands, making sure not to spill a single drop? Can we chill our overactive minds, freeze those gnats of nonsense, and feast on the fulfilling? Can we heed the wisdom of Emerson, grandest thinker of them all? 

Build therefore your own world. Unfold your mind’s greatest proportions. So fast will disagreeable appearances, spiders, snakes, pests, enemies, vanish: they are temporary and shall be no more seen. The sun shall dry up and the wind exhale.

Amen. May we silence the noise and broaden our minds. May we fill our lives with the grand, and let the pesky fade away.