I remember reading a story about an indigenous tradition that said that sometimes, when we travel, our bodies get ahead of our souls and must wait for our souls to catch up.

That is much older wisdom than the phenomenon of jet lag, but it still seems to hold for journeys taken “merely” by car, and even in the same time zone.

Someone I know calls this jet-less lag jet mood, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s showing up a lot during these relatively homebound days and months.

Whenever we find ourselves temporarily devoid of soul, for whatever reason, we get understandably cranky.

And those, naturally, are the times to be quiet and patient and gentle, as we wait for the soul to catch up, as it will.

The past few days, I’ve been thinking again of the “Briefing for Entry into a More Harsh Environment” that’s shared with NOLS students returning from field courses.

The first week of a course in the backcountry is also an introduction to an unfamiliar and (in ways) unforgiving environment. Much of that time is spent relearning how to accomplish everyday tasks in new and different ways. Students re-learn how to walk, cook, brush their teeth, and take care of bodily functions.

But after a month, new habits stick — and graduates have to be reminded to wait for the walk lights and to spit toothpaste gently into the sink rather than spraying it across the mirror.

Basically nobody knew how to live in a pandemic, but everyone adjusted to the environment they found themselves in once we all got locked down.

Moving houses in the middle of all this changes the game. The environment may or may not be harsher or more dangerous, but it feels different — and different feels particularly fraught these days.

The ground rules are the same: to care for ourselves and those we encounter as best we can. But the applications feel vastly different now that we can go out among groups of people multiple times a day instead of maybe once a week.

Frenetic activity is addictive. And, in our culture, it can easily be construed as a status symbol.

It’s at least as easy to conflate doing more (or the most!) with making things better.

But it’s also easy to see, if you sit with it a minute, how brittle that is: you can’t do the best, more important work all the time. No one can.

If it wasn’t so frenetic, would it still matter?

If not, where’s the opportunity to do what really needs to be done? To fix something so it stays fixed? To do something that matters enough — and to work at it well enough — that you can take a weekend off?

Sprinting all the time gives you shin splints. Sprinting and resting, sprinting and resting: that’s what makes you stronger and faster.

That sort of insipid phrase is now both a touchstone and a trope in our culture. And, like so much else in our culture, it can be polarizing.

Who’s it for?

What’s it for?

(Really?)

And what, if anything, are we actually willing to sacrifice for those who’ve faced terror and done their duty so that others might live?

Frankly, our track record isn’t great.

We’re three presidents and five terms into the War on Terrorism, and terrorism (foreign and domestic) is doing just fine. The war itself is old enough to vote, and we keep voting for it.

Sure, we might have to go into the pandemic with the insurance-industrial system we have, not the healthcare system we might want or wish to have in the future … but, sooner or later, the pandemic will abate and the future arrive.

And what will we choose to say and do, vote for and pay for, then?

A pretty good week for cultural consumption, if not necessarily for the culture:

Podcasts
In addition to the new Broken Record episode with Jason Isbell from earlier this week, my favorite show was the third episode from the second season of Michael Lewis’s Against the Rules.

The premise of the entire show — the feeling of the loss of fairness in American life — is fascinating, and I’ve particularly enjoyed this season’s ongoing look at the rise of coaches following the disappearance of refs (season one).

There’s a throwaway line in S2E3 about how the explosion in the popularity of coaching first required the culture to view everything in market terms. That’s a fascinating assertion I’d like to hear more about (and it reminds me of a friend’s thesis that coaches are the priestly class of the new “religion of work”).

Book
Book on CD (!!), actually: a delightful second listen to George Saunders’s amazing Lincoln in the Bardo. Sure, the text is excellent, but it’s the full cast of 166 narrators — many of whom you know of — that makes for an audio experience like none other.

Magazine
The rise of coaching might be new, but the unfairness of American life isn’t.

Two from the Oxford American, without further comment:

• “Who Owns Southern Food?“
• “An Intersection at the End of America:” a portrait of Dilley, TX — “the middle of nowhere” even by Texan standards, where prisons, oil, and smuggling meet.

A backfill post, just to test the capability.

If it does work, great.

And if not, an opportunity for me to breathe deeply and accept the hiccups of life.

Time capsule: today marks 10 weeks since we went into quarantine, and the (re)start of a new adventure.

It’s still too early to really make meaning of it, but I’m amazed as ever at the human ability to adapt to circumstance, and the small joys that make up what we mean by “living,” as Norman Maclean wrote.

Yesterday, it was a very short drive down the hill to the grocery store with the windows down and spotty classic rock on the radio.

And today, we just can’t wait to get on the road again.

I was listening to a Broken Record podcast interview with Jason Isbell yesterday morning, and Jason said something so good I have to steal it.

There’s a lot of great and wise material in that show, much of it to do with training and focusing the attention (which is something I’ve been playing with pretty extensively over the past five weeks coaching the altMBA).

And the line that just nailed me (as near as I can remember it) went like this:

There’s one way to look at life and it’s all just traffic and storms, right? I mean, we’ll be sitting in traffic till a storm comes and kills us. But I don’t like to look at life that way, and I can choose not to.

There’s plenty of other masterful and mystical stuff in there, not to mention some great music stripped down to its solo-acoustic essence.

But consider: how much traffic are you sitting in, mentally, and how are you dealing with the storms?

What sort of a life are you looking for, and what kind do you believe in?

Dinner conversation last night broke down into a couple of camps, broadly speaking.

One group circled around the idea that we need a more progressive platform, no matter the candidate.

The other focused on the idea that we need the most electable combination of ticket and platform we can possibly find, in order to be able to work any agenda at all.

It’s true that both the platform and the candidate have to stand for something — especially in the age of assertions spread by social media.

But the something (or somethings) have to win. Our system awards precious few consolation prizes.

As the great theologian Walter Brueggemann uses the term, the royal imagination basically stands for the insistence (usually against all evidence) that everything is fine.

Don’t believe your eyes: look on my works — and these fabulous new clothes.

The prophetic imagination, which always stands in opposition to the royal one, says that everything is in fact not fine: that this is not who we are, or how we meant (or were meant) to live.

According to Brueggemann, the royal imagination is rooted in and insistent upon the eternal now. This is all there is, or was, or ever could be. The prophetic imagination, in contrast, always reaches back to a lost past to project a renewed future.

There’s another imagination, though, that I’m not sure Brueggemann ever named. Let’s call it (with all due irony) the millennial imagination. That imagination starts in the future and extrapolates from there: once some desired event happens — a favorite candidate’s election, say, or some policy proposal becoming law — then it’ll all be fine. Onwards and upwards forevermore.

There are two obvious dangers to this imagination. First, Pharaoh’s objection: “Not in a million years!” (Remember, this and now is all there is or will be.) Second, some would-be Pharaoh might actually believe the hype. And the imperial imagination may beggar the royal one.

Goodness knows we can and must shake off the stupor of the royal imagination.

But the prophetic imagination might be a better guide than the millennial one.