Have you ever tried to be extra spiritual on a particular day? Your toddlers know. They always know.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, which is a fine time to try to be spiritual. For toddlers, it is a fine time to melt down before breakfast about how hungry they are, and then refuse to eat the breakfast you frantically cooked, and then divide and conquer, one dumping bucket after bucket of items onto the kitchen floor and the other pushing all the lightweight (aka IKEA) furniture they can into the doorway of said disaster zone kitchen. All this before 7:30 am! And therefore I am calling it Crash Wednesday, because we slammed into our Lenten life with wailing, hitting, and burnt French toast.
The Hubs and I are giving up the news for Lent this year. That’s forty days of not knowing what kind of atrocities are being committed and which politicians are tantruming worse than my children. It sounds kind of blissful and yet I’m a little wary of all that free head space. What will I listen to in the car during rare moments when the harmonies of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber are not being blasted from the stereo? How will I clean the kitchen at night with just myself thinking? There’s an element of legitimate fear there – I’ve been plagued with intrusive thoughts the past year so I often lean on NPR’s more thoughtful shows to get me out of the sadistic playground of my own head.
However I’m also looking forward to the time regained. As our family oriented around the school calendar for the first time this fall, I committed to a life of more walking, more thinking, more writing, and less Netflix and social media. This news-less practice will hopefully take me a little deeper.
For those of you crashing into your own Lenten seasons, take heart. We make space for the mysterious during Lent, but sometimes that’s what we get: shoulder shrugging, head scratching mystery. If you’ve never “lented” anything, and you can’t understand why people give up the good stuff – sugar, caffeine, booze, Joshua Johnson – it’s actually really lovely to be reminded that we’re stronger than our brain’s habitual patterning, that we’re capable of dealing with the nerve wracking quiet space found when we abstain from a thing we love.
I’m hoping to write a post every day in Lent (40 Daze), because what else will I do with all this news-free head space? I hope you will read along, or do the opposite: completely abstain from other people’s internet content. Do whatever is best for your soul, and be not afraid.
