The instantaneousness of culture robs mindfulness. Attempting to enjoy a fleeting moment of fulfillment when there’s always “something” better, bigger, and higher is unattainable. Like counting stars or sand grains on beaches. The accepted insatiable. Some kind of entitled indignation, breeding a longstanding rejection. The spirit of American attention, crumbling from a lack of commitment to the process.

You want a cerebral experience in five minutes that people wait patiently for decades to experience in their life. You are careening into space and ejected aimlessly into orbit. A special kind of blackness that always thinks there’s a way out, but can never see anything different except for what’s next. One empty hope building on the next. There’s some earthly remedy for my growing spiritual wound, we reason.

It’s a wealthy anxiousness. A bigger barn mentality. There’s not time to enjoy. There’s only time for more. Thinking, considering, and being present. These are activities of the past, before there were true and admirable things to really be consumed with, not ideas, of course, but of having and experiencing what it might be to make it. To win while someone else loses. When the next barn is all that’s left to build, the human heart faces an emptiness of a bewildering sort. A kind often only awoken by death.

“And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.” ‭‭Luke‬ ‭12‬:‭18‬ ‭KJV‬‬