The past year has been one focused on an intentional and personal \u201cslowing down.\u201d \u00a0I was feeling very harried after a long church transition and needed to make some changes.\u00a0 I started last January to intentionally make my coffee every morning using only a French Press.\u00a0 No Keurig, no buying it at the bagel place across the street.\u00a0 I would wake up, boil the water, stir the coffee grounds, and wait.\u00a0 The coffee was delicious and it was my own little personal\/spiritual\/devotional\/co-creating time with the divine every morning.\u00a0 It was wonderful.<\/p>\n
Later that winter, with the encouragement and support of the Curriculum Director at the Church Nursery School, I started tapping the maple trees in our yard.\u00a0 We did this to help walk the nursery school students, not just the maple sugar process, but to demonstrate how we are in fact connected to nature, connected to our food, and to show them where some of our food comes from.\u00a0 \u00a0I loved it .\u00a0 . . and the nursery school kids had a ball!\u00a0 They loved checking the buckets every morning; some mornings were so cold we could see maple sap ice.\u00a0 Have you ever bitten into frozen maple sap?\u00a0 The nursery school kids at Huguenot have!\u00a0 We turned the kitchen of the church into the Maple Sugar Shack, boiled the sap down and then had some of our \u2018syrup\u201d on waffles.\u00a0 The students, teachers and I all had a blast maple sugaring together.<\/p>\n
This past January I even took the jump into the home-brewing arena.\u00a0 Wanting to keep the process as simple as possible, I made my very own hard cider, from apples I pressed, fermented, and then bottled myself.\u00a0 The result?\u00a0 It certainly wasn\u2019t good . . . but was better than I had expected!<\/p>\n
I share all of these stories because each instance (coffee from a press, maple sugaring, hard cider brewing) takes patience, time, and working with natural elements.\u00a0 I can assure you that none of them provide the same sort of instant gratification that I get from scrolling through my Instagram feed or looking up the latest hilarious hashtag.\u00a0 I am incredibly grateful for the work of Cal Newport and his riveting text Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World<\/em> because I knew a year ago that something was amiss, but I did not realize until reading his book just how much of a toll my digital consumption was having on my soul. \u00a0All three of these activities allowed me to spend some time on my own, and to reclaim leisure, two of the practices Newton recommends for anyone along the path to digital minimalism.[i]<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0I look forward to further reflection, my own digital declutter, and most likely including much of this philosophy into the sabbatical work I am going to undertake this summer.<\/p>\n In his introduction, Newport writes \u201clong before Henry David Thoreau exclaimed \u201csimplicity, simplicity, simplicity,\u201d Marcus Aurelius asked: \u201cYou see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?\u201d[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 I am a huge Thoreau fan, have visited Walden pond, and this line of thinking reminds me of many things in the Bible, but perhaps the most important connection is manna in the desert.\u00a0 The Hebrews were wandering in the desert, hungry, looking for the promised land, when God blesses them with food.\u00a0 This food was named manna, which the Biblical authors describe as looking sort of like graham crackers, would spoil overnight.\u00a0 So after learning about this manna and its \u201cshelf-life,\u201d the Hebrews \u201cmeasured it with an Omer, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed.\u201d[iii]<\/a>\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that what Digital Minimalism looks like, each of us using only what is needed?\u00a0 What if in every aspect of our lives, not just in the digital realm, we lived lives of gratitude. Grateful for enough, and not looking for an overabundance.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (New York: Portfolio\/Penguin, 2019), 165.<\/p>\n