a Sweat shirt
I have never been on a real hunt for artifacts, buried treasure, or some other prize that is hidden and shrouded in mystery.
But I have been to a thrift store looking for clothes, which is about the same.
On a random Saturday, Holley and Bailey and I went on a thrift store excursion. We explored the usual spaces and places, sifting through rack after rack.
It is an odd kind of safari, shopping for clothes at a thrift store. Sometimes the reward is substantial, as in the fact that I haven’t purchased a new shirt for work in about 4 years. Other times, the trail is cold and for me the coldest trail is one through the men’s jeans and pants.
No treasure to be found.
But on this most recent excursion, I hit a vein of gold at the last store. A grey hooded sweatshirt. It fit me. There were no stains. Victory.
I took it home and washed it and then it became more than just a sweatshirt. It became a daily marker, a symbol even.
As human beings we are built for rhythms and routines.
Even the most free-wheeling person you know has a set of repeated behaviors that give their life fullness and meaning. Some people are high-structure beings, with minutes and hours planned to a tee.
My father-in-law’s family had the same meal on specific nights growing up. Pot roast on one night, fish another. Over time, that gave structure to life and helped them find their bearings during the week.
As a person of faith it is hard to miss the place of structure, rhythms, and habits. Our brains thrive on repetition; the soft tissue of our neurological wonderland shapes itself around things that happen repeatedly.
Repeated disciplines change our thinking
Repeated traumas deepen our darkness.
Seasonal holidays teach our brain to say, “Oh, it’s that time again. Here we are.”
Two things I’ve learned about habits and routines:
1. Habits and routines give us life by shaping our brains and bodies to live deeply into the end result of those habits.
2. Habits and routines DO get stale over time.
It is important for us to remember that just because the second item exists does not mean the first is irrelevant and should be tossed out.
When that happens, when we lose our habits and well-worn ways, the fruit of that loss is difficult to miss.
Just an example: a church community that has no space for lament, for the celebration of Lent, for the silent prayers about our own darkness and the darkness of the world? They won’t have much to offer corporately or even individually when it comes to suffering.
Which may be why Christian faith is receding a bit these days – it is hard to join a community that responds to suffering and sorrow with one more corporate song in a major key.
But then there’s the sweatshirt.
As someone who works primarily in a home office, I have my routines and rituals. They mark the day and give me a sense of what’s going on as well as revealing activities that do not fit.
A morning fruit smoothie.
10am bowl of almonds.
2pm dog walk (when possible).
There is a challenge however when your office is at home, and that challenge is the fact that you have the potential to be at work all the time. Just a jaunt down the hallway and I can reconnect with the tools of my trade. Commentaries. Writing. Podcasting.
We were not born to live in a constantly-connected way, and much like the fruit of lost habits it is easy to see the fruit of constant connection.
Irritation at simple things. Impatience with things that require just a little bit more attention than others.
The draw towards saying, “I just need to take care of one last thing.” Then, we succumb and we are lost.
So when 5pm arrives, my hope is a habit. Actually I’ve come to look forward to it. The habit involves – shocking, I know – my thrift store sweatshirt.
Poet and philosopher John O’Donahue mentions the Celtic concept of “thresholds.” These are the times-between-times, much like the land between the border of one territory and the border of another. It is a space where we journey and shed the land left behind us.
This is a space of conversion; it is a place where we shift our minds and hearts from one thing to another.
Visiting this place once is called “transition.”
To return to the threshold places day after day? That’s called transformation.
At (or around) 5pm, I close the blinds to the office. I shut down my computer and close my notebook.
I walk across the hall to our bedroom and there, where I left it last night, is the sweatshirt. I close the blinds to the bedroom and turn on the electric blanket (Chicago, y’all, it’s never too early to start warming up the bed).
Then I put on the sweatshirt.
I can feel the transition from work to opening up to the evening. To my family, to a meal yet to come – the sweatshirt is a threshold in a way. It reminds me that a day can end, a rhythm can resolve into another way of being and life will be fine.
While I ease into the warmth of a piece of clothing, the Divine is still hard at work running the universe I am vastly underqualified to even describe. Much less order and run it.
When we have a daily threshold moment, however it may look for us, it teaches us the humility of our own edges. We learn the limits of our competency and capacity. Rest becomes not an enemy or a weakness but the natural result of a life lived honestly and courageously with the Divine.
To be relieved of our assumed role as world-sustainer and one with bottomless capacity teaches us the gracious way of knowing what IS ours to do.
I’m writing this at 11:01am, and I’m already thinking about the sweatshirt. The time will come when the work is done for today and the space between the spaces calls me. The habit of surrender teaches me to pay attention to the haunting of grace.
Find your sweatshirt today, your place between the places, and know that your brain will love you for finding the Divine day after day in that wilderness.
Photo by Daniel Cañibano on Unsplash
