The Clockwork Spirit
Clocks have been on my mind. I appreciate the mechanical craftsmanship of them, the tiny gears and intricate springs that form their heart and store energy so that it may be transformed into movement. And it seems to me there is a jazz-like eccentricity to the way watches are made. Like, surely it would be fine to make any given watch with one more or one less tiny little gear, right? Watchmakers are definitely doing what they do with an improvisational spirit, even if they probably have come up with an actual plan by the time they start putting the pieces together.
The many pieces of a watch remind me of how we are formed. People and institutions and stories touch us from a very early age, each leaving us with a new gear, something that fits into and builds on top of what is already there. These little pieces form the clockworks of our spirits and become who we are. Schools, family, friends, culture—all are sources of screws and gears, inlays and gems, arms and hands. Some of these, like schools and parenting, are more intentional. Others, like friendships and interactions with strangers, are more happenstance.
Within this visual metaphor, friendship and romance become a beautiful, sacred exchange. We freely give bits and pieces of ourselves, becoming a part of the mechanics of each other’s souls. Sometimes, a friendship or a romance doesn’t go the distance. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t added to the amount of beauty or good in the world. I believe in the power of connection and that the more we share of ourselves with others, the greater the chance of good, meaningful exchanges. These sorts of things, I think, are in perfect alignment with God’s hopes for us.
Other generators of the pieces of our clockwork souls are failing in a significant way. Institutional sources, schools in particular, are struggling to add to our soul pieces of value (functionally or aesthetically).
When I see the way kids feel about education by the time they are done with school, I am deeply disturbed. How is that we have turned learning—the pursuit of knowledge, that sacred transmission from generation to generation that is the lifeblood of civilization—into a series of rote tasks? A to-do list of the mind?
The failures of the education system have a devastating impact on the spirit. Working in academic advising, it was all too common to see students, who should be—who would naturally be—bright young minds full of hope and energy turn into exhausted, dispirited husks by the time they graduated college, like a marathon runner limping across the finish line. Their spirits were dying from an overaccumulation of the meaningless, of courses filled with busywork and assignments that test obedience over creativity. Each year, students are asked to jump through more and more hoops, and from an earlier and earlier age. Middle schoolers are preparing for college. How insane is that?
I am an optimist and doom and gloomerism makes my skin crawl. Nevertheless, I fear things may get worse before they get better here. With a revolution in computing and language generation looming on the horizon, the pressure for young students to do more meaningless work more efficiently will be higher than ever. To overcome this, there will be a need for new institutions, new ways of thinking and doing and relating, and we must find the spiritual fortitude to push back on bad ideas in the mainstream. Do you think it really matters if your daughter goes to Harvard instead of state? Is gaining entry to those vaunted halls worth inflicting spiritual pain on a young soul?
In the default culture, there is already a pervasive sense of being optimized to death. Life has become about experiencing everything, about maximizing your options but never committing, never risking anything, be it money or your ego or your heart. Where did we go so wrong? How can we redirect entire wayward generations back to the truly important things in life, like family and community?
I do not have the answers to these difficult questions. But it is clear that the paths you keep open become the garden of roads untraveled. I am certain that we were not meant to walk through life accumulating forks in the road. Perhaps it is time for us to stop walking on the road altogether.