Summer Reset (enjoy being bored)

So what do we do when the days get full and our practice of celebrating slowly falls by the wayside? Summer reset of course! The beauty of celebrating slowly is that it doesn't take mountains of effort or planning. It's about taking notice in the chaos or calling out your autopilot mode and pausing to slow your mind. Even those of us who are well-versed in mindful, prayerful practices and have built rituals into our lives can be distracted by the routine. Like we discussed in Carrying celebration beyond the season, celebrating slowly is the approach of infusing meaning into routines so that we experience them as purposeful rituals.

So what does this look like in practice? It's the act of noticing and appreciating. For example, take my drive through the desert. Earier this summer, I was in a car for 9 hours during one leg of a roadtrip. I was in the part of the California-Nevada drive where cars are few and far between, semi-trucks are most of the traffic, and the only signs on the road are the ones that tell you that the closest gas station is 20+ miles away. It's the kind of thing that easily lends itself to "boring," but like I say to my kids when they complain of boredom -- "good" because it presents an opportunity to get creative. There's no activity or distraction to separate me from the moment. My two choices are to either sit in the awkwardness of quiet discontentment (aka be bored) or I can find a sense of appreciation. So as I sat in the car--hours in with hours to go--I started paying attention to the landscape around me. Where others saw desert, I saw beauty. How many kinds of plant life and terrain can you see in the snapshot below? I started to notice colors, shapes, and groupings. I was even surprised, and visibly gasped, when I saw a new type of tree I hadn't seen before. I started to be in awe of God's creative mind and grow in appreciation for all the different kinds and types and varieties of created things. That's the difference between being on autopilot and celebrating slowly.

So if the days have gotten away from you and you've lost a bit of your ritual practice, try this simple reset. Adjust the suggested times to a length that makes sense for your life and what will help you build meaning. So put your tech down, pick a number from the mental reset challenge below, and you might just find yourself enjoying being bored.