First Things First

This was previously posted here, and seems a good way to begin:

My daughter was born almost a month ago, and I could easily spend all day just watching her sleep (she returns the favor by keeping me up all night).* Of course, that’s not very practical—there are more pressing concerns in life. And yet, it’s funny how easily far less important things end up filling my time.

Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, First Things First, etc.) categorizes all activities into four types based on whether they are “important or not important” and “urgent or not urgent,” and urges us to analyze all our activities by these two criteria. Now you might expect him to advise focusing on the “important and urgent” activities, but he actually suggests focusing on those things that are “important but not urgent,” while cutting out the “not important and not urgent” pursuits that eat up so much of our time. As he notes, our natural tendency to focus on whatever is most urgent (interspersed with “breaks” filled with meaningless activities) may seem productive, but really prevents us from controlling our overall direction in life, and cuts out many of the best things in life. While we’re busy putting out fires left and right, we find that there’s no time left for things like poetry [do click through and read this, it's good!].

But my interest today is on those “not important and not urgent” activities. With the countless distractions modern technology has provided us, it's easy to feel that we risk burnout if we fail to take time for such trivia. We get the idea that occasional breaks for sitcoms or video games actually help our productivity as a whole, and feel justified in “vegging out” every now and then.

Unfortunately, this simply isn’t true. The problem is when you start thinking you need to do these things, they steadily eat up more and more of your time, especially if—like me—you work from home. At first, maybe you can work a whole day before feeling like you need to “check out” for a half hour. Pretty soon every three hours you need an hour break. Before long, you hardly get much done even when you are working; you feel like you always need a break.

But a funny thing happens when you stop and say: I really don’t need to be playing these games in the first place. You feel really bored for a day or two, and then suddenly you find that you can be productive for longer and longer stretches without any “brain breaks” at all. I know from personal experience: it's shocking how little such activities are missed once you get away from them, and how much more you can get done once they're gone.

And the best part is: cutting out such “not important and not urgent” activities doesn’t just let you be more effective at accomplishing the urgent activities, it also (and primarily) frees up your time for all those “important but not urgent” things that you always want to do, but never find the time for. When you cut out meaningless leisure activities, you suddenly have the freedom to pursue the ones that are truly satisfying: hobbies, sports, viewing/reading/listening to art (which can include good movies and television, though it probably can’t justify an afternoon of Friends reruns), deep thinking and reading, meaningful conversation and—my personal favorite—watching your baby girl sleep.

*Now two, my daughter no longer keeps me up at night (that will be my son's job now), but as a curious and conversational toddler, she certainly still keeps me busy.

Happiness and Parenting

My second child, a son, is due in just under three weeks, and I’m already anticipating the sleepless nights and messy diapers (so don’t be surprised if suddenly disappear for a few days). Meanwhile, my daughter is now two years old, and while she is still relatively well-behaved, she’s learned how to throw a mean tantrum on the slightest provocation. For instance, today she threw herself to the floor, rolling and screaming and pretending to cry, simply because I told her that she couldn’t take her bowl of goldfish crackers with her to the potty.

When she throws such a fit, I only have a few options: 1. Give in, buying temporary peace but teaching her that such tactics work; 2. Bribe her with some other alternative, again, teaching her that such tactics work; 3. Ignore her and hope she’ll get bored and stop whining on her own (this rarely works); or 4. Punish her in one way or another, making her even more upset in the (faint) hope that next time she might become a better and more mature person. Bad options, all three, but necessary because she doesn’t yet have an adequate understanding of what’s good for her. She doesn’t understand why she needs to eat vegetables, why she can’t watch too much TV, why daddy can’t spend all day playing with her.

To be sure, there is much more to parenting than dealing with tantrums. My daughter also provides countless moments of laughter and joy, and when she hugs me and tells me she loves me—I wouldn’t trade that for anything. But one thing she doesn’t give me is much time to pursue my own interests. Whether she’s in a good mood or a bad, she always draws a lot of attention to herself. Life is simply more chaotic, stressful and full with her around. Perhaps that’s why this story doesn’t surprise me much (HT Thinking Christian):

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. "Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children.

I’m not sure how they can claim to measure such a thing, but if happiness includes settled contentment, I’ve little doubt that the average parent feels less of it than they would without kids—there’s just so much more to worry about as a parent. But such happiness is not the goal of life. It is precisely the challenges, the struggles, the fact that I am forced to center my attention on someone else, that teach me what real unconditional love is. In truth, I love my daughter more deeply than I ever could have imagined, and I’ve little doubt that the same will be true of my son. But that kind of love can hardly be reduced to mere “happiness,” for it includes not only great joy, but also a fervent desire to see the best for them, even when that means making all of us temporarily unhappy.

And I wonder if the same isn’t true of God’s love for us. For I too frequently don’t know what’s best for my life. I too frequently think the world ought to revolve around my desires. I too am frequently unable to see that the things that make me unhappy can be for my own good, to teach me how to be a better, more mature person. Perhaps I needed to become a parent myself, to learn why I am still a child of God.

C.S. Lewis on Worship

The always brilliant C.S. Lewis includes some further thoughts on worship in The Problem of Pain:

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love', and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. 'Thou has created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'. To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because he already loves us He must labour to make us lovable....

Clashes of interest, and therefore opportunities either of selfishness or unselfishness, occur only between beings inhabiting a common world: God can no more be in competition with a creature than Shakespeare can be in competition with Viola. When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.... [W]hen God empties Himself of His glory and submits to those conditions under which alone egoism and altruism have a clear meaning, He is seen to be wholly altruistic. But God in His transcendence--God as the unconditioned ground of all conditions--cannot easily be thought of in the same way. We call human love selfish when it satisfies its own needs at the expense of the object's needs... [but] God has no needs.... God is goodness. He can give good, but he cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive....

Those divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about 'His glory's diminution'? A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces.... Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little. [pgs. 40-43, 46-47]

Merry Christmas!

Whew! My busiest semester yet is finally over. In two weeks I'll have to start again, but for now I at last have a chance to catch my breath, spend time with my wife and daughter, perhaps even write a few blog posts (has it really been a month since the last one?). As a start, here are two Christmas-related stories that caught my eye:

As it turns out, this central Christian holiday really does make us happier--imagine that! No offense to George Bailey and Charlie Brown, but depression and suicide rates actually decrease around Christmas.

Also, apparently even Richard Dawkins enjoys singing Christmas carols. I’d love to see a youtube clip of the arch-atheist himself singing:

Joy to the world, the Lord has come!
Let earth receive her king!
Let every heart prepare him room!
And heaven and nature sing!