The Golden Minute

The Golden Minute, Bruce Charlton’s latest characteristically winsome post, is crying out for a virtue chart.

On the one hand, “for just one time I would take the Northwest passage”–“this was their finest hour”–“better 50 years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”

On the other hand, “masterful inaction”–wu-wei–“be still and know that I am God”–“the unexamined life is not worth living”

On the one hand, we’ve all had the unhappy experience of being listless and getting nowhere.  We all know energetic people who seem to accomplish much.

On the other hand, so many driven people seem to accomplish things that end up going nowhere.  They do a lot, but what they do doesn’t do anything.  Having goals doesn’t mean you have good goals.  For every Elon Musk, dozens of Jeff Bezos.

Our bodies push in the direction of doing nothing: ”milling around.”

Most everything else pushes the other way.  Once you overcome inertia, you want to avoid a too restful state because then you have all the work of overcoming the inertia all over again.  What is more, you are suspicious of resting and contemplation, you worry that its just an excuse to do nothing.  Because sometimes you DO make excuses for doing nothing.

The heightened awareness and sense of being alive you get when you are thrown up against the knife’s edge of action is wonderful.  So are the pure strokes of intelligence you get when contemplating, the ones that almost bring you to tears.  But the action feeling is repeatable and can almost be brought up on demand if you put the effort in, whereas the contemplation feeling only comes sometimes and only when it wants to.

The gospel teaches us that our essence is to be an agent–in other words, to act.

When you learn to wrap your mind around the eternities, then this life seems like an infinitesimally small time that will have enormous effects–which seems like that knife’s edge of action.

When you get gospel perspective, you realize that you are surrounded by perils to big for you, and your only way forward is to make open-ended commitments beyond what you can control or even predict.  In other words, you are on the cliff’s edge leaping.  In action mode.

When you fully grasp the distance between you and God, and that He is willing to help you bridge it, it also puts you in action mode.  Uncounted riches if only you reach for them.

But that very distance means we can’t just run headlong all the time.  We are so far away we don’t even know where we are going.  Our destination is relationship with God, which cannot be achieved just by scrabbling harder.

When I dreamed the most action hero set-up I could, a small fort surrounded by monster hordes, the Spirit told me I would win the battle and the war by spending more leisure time with my kids.

You are on the tightwalk–leisurely.  You are on the cliff’s edge–strolling.