The destruction of hearths

  • I have a fixed dream of a hearth of my own — even lit­er­ally, of an open fire­place with its wood fire, of books and a gar­den of my own. Of course these are vain dreams; our whole life, and the course of his­tory itself, are opposed to this, lead­ing as they do to the destruc­tion of hearths and the dis­in­te­gra­tion of fam­ily life, to the anthill and the beehive.

    – Fr. Alexan­der Elchani­nov, “The Diary of a Russ­ian Priest”

    Maybe that’s a sad quote. But there’s so much truth in it that I’m will­ing to risk a lit­tle melan­choly. Mod­ern life is about rush­ing, doing, going, … all activ­ity, and if you can find a way to cram more activ­ity into the alloted hours, so much the bet­ter. After all, we’re the gen­er­a­tion that invented a way that you can talk on the phone any­where you are, work on the com­puter while watch­ing the world news and sup­pos­edly lis­ten to your spouse or your kids. (Not that they’d say much. They get tired of your inat­ten­tion and start shut­ting down. Besides, they’ve got their own phone, their own com­puter, and so their own world.) Things like read­ing books, sit­ting by fire­sides — or pray­ing unhur­riedly, for that mat­ter — are out of place.

    But they’re worth fight­ing for. I don’t know how other peo­ple man­age to keep their san­ity, but I keep mine with the aid of those things that give me a tem­po­rary respite from the anthill and the beehive.


    Related posts:

    1. Anti­ochian Vil­lage — almost heaven, almost Pittsburgh
    2. Harry Pot­ter — yeah, why not?

    January 29th, 2007 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • Jim N. 01.29.2007

    One of the down­sides of doing some­thing some­thing that you enjoy and get paid (one of my side jobs for instance), is that because its enjoy­able I’m always think­ing about it. It gets me up in the morn­ing. So, slow­ing down becomes all the harder! It was eas­ier to slow down when I hated what I did!

  • Grace

    Boy, do I under­stand that. And it’s a curi­ous prob­lem — maybe even one we should be glad to have. But I’ve got the same sit­u­a­tion. I’m so well-suited to my job that I really don’t mind bring­ing it into evening and week­end hours.

    That’s a good thing, I guess, but I’d still like to man­age my work­ing hours a lit­tle bet­ter so that leisure time was leisure time. As it is, I’m never really sure. It all kind of blends together, and the prob­lem with that is that then nei­ther the work time nor the leisure time is quite allowed to do what it’s sup­posed to be doing — I’m nei­ther fully pro­duc­tive nor fully UNproductive.

  • Jim N.

    Thats my exact prob­lem. The two bleed together and nei­ther is ever really it’s own. Per­haps if I went into an office each day it would be different…

  • Grace

    Yep, work­ing at home has its perks, for sure, but it has its dis­ad­van­tages. One of the expres­sions I’ve come up with that I’m try­ing to say over and over until I inter­nal­ize it is: When the work never ends, the work never begins. Mean­ing that as long as I insist on blur­ring the line at day’s end, I’ll always find that it blurs at day’s begin­ning, and so I’m just not focus­ing the way I want to.

    Like I said, I’m try­ing to inter­nal­ize that, but it’s really hard to change the way you work. Got any­thing that works for you?

  • Jim N.

    Unfor­tu­nately, no. Even when I was in an office every day, work/personal blurred together at the begin­ning and end of each day. I don’t think any­one actu­ally started work­ing until 10am, and usu­ally every­one was fin­ished up by about 3:30 or 4. The first and last hour were reserved for cof­fee runs, chat­ting, etc, and it’s the same here at the home office.

    I hon­estly don’t know what I’d do if I had to knuckle down and *work* for eight hours straight! So, I don’t have any­thing that works for me. :(

  • Grace

    How about writ­ing blog com­ments? That’s a lot like work, right? (I hope so, anyway.)

    Well, I’m glad that some­one else had the same dynamic at the “pay­check” job as I did. I was feel­ing bad about how few actual bill­able hours I had work­ing for myself until I stopped to think how many hours on the pay­check job were spent not work­ing. Between lunch breaks, use­less meet­ings, “smoke” breaks (only one of us smoked, but a group of us would go out “to keep her com­pany”) and just goof­ing around when there was no work to do, it seemed like it ended up about the same.

    I’m with you. I think if I ever had to do a 40-hour week of REAL work, I’d drop dead.

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