Consider this/ Einfach zum Nachdenken

 I love winter. Maybe it is because for the last fifteen years I have hardly seen any, living under the constant influence of the Gulf Stream. Winters in the UK were mainly characterized by cold rain, rarely by snow. Now I am living in Michigan, and we are having the mother of all winters: minus 24 degrees centigrade, frozen lakes, and lots of snow. As a result, I have to date (and it’s only 5^th of Feb) shoveled more snow than the previous fifteen years. Easily!

My shift starts at 6am. I am just about the only one awake, and have been for over an hour. My morning routine is pretty much finished, and I am ready to face the day. So if it snowed overnight, I am out there with shovel and broom, to clear the walks before any old lady could break her hip just outside the brothers’ house. This morning again, I spent about 30 minutes clearing the 4 inches (10.6 cm) that had come down. As I was heaving shovels of crisp powder, there was a certain sense of futility in my mind: I could see that where I had started the ground had turned white again by the time I was finished. So what was the point of clearing a driveway which would need shoveling in just a couple of hours? Isn't this Sisyphus Revisited (he was the guy who was condemned to rolling a stone up the mountain only to see it roll down again- and that ad infinitum)?

But at the same time I experience something very refreshing in my snow shoveling activity. Not only does it not require a lot of mental power, its monotony is strangely soothing. The very fact that the same task will be here again tomorrow renders this work remarkably stable. And I know from gardeners and farmers that they experience similar emotions when they weed their plots or milk their cows. As they repeat for the umpteenth time the same tasks, they sink into a contemplative, zen-like groove.

People have long tried to explain why this is so, and what takes place in the human heart to make a potentially mind-numbing task so fruitful. The desert fathers of the 4^th century Egypt used to weave baskets and sometimes did not even sell them, but burnt them at the end of the year. And yet they did not consider their job hopeless, on the contrary: they considered repetitive work a good antidote for acedia. Acedia is the temptation to not care about anything, to refuse love and sink into selfishness. Many of us experience that temptation at times; one could even make the point that our age has made acedia the fashionable outlook on life: a certain malaise, a lack of drive or vision, just letting life wash over us.

So wise counselors and psychiatrists both advise people thus tempted to undertake repetitive tasks: if it is not basket making, it can be baking bread, scrubbing floors or, as in my case, shoveling snow. Such tasks which repeat themselves ground us and make us understand that life needs us, even if we don’t feel like it: a cow moos when it is not milked, an old lady slipping outside my house might well clip me behind the ears. So being needed helps us snap out of acedia, self-concern and depression. So next time it is your shift to shovel snow, take out the trash or change the diapers, understand that it is God’s gentle way to invite you to forget yourself and love as if it really counted.