Contentment

I recently published three agendas—philosophical, ecclesial, technological—and I've had four more lined up:

• political: start a new political party inspired by William Penn;
• scientific: use Googlebot to demonstrate that the physical realm arises out of the spiritual as the mental out of the physical;
• theological: reconcile Liberal Aristotelianism with Christianity;
  
• evangelistic: save tons of people

Then today I read Chapter 1 of The Spiritual Brain and I had a severe anxiety attack. Here I am completely surrounded by no neuroscience! It puts me in mind of this quote from Reader's Digest, of all places:

Complicating matters, says Wurman, is the explosion of what he calls noninformation—the Internet’s jumbled mass of raw data, which fuels anxiety because you can’t digest it all, yet feel compelled to keep trying.

I'll tell you what really motivates me sometimes. I want to be the crazy Christian that can hang with John Brockman & Co. I want to work at Google and speak at TED and drink with Nick Bostrom. You know what? F*** that. Right?

I had a professor who once said something like this: "If Christians practiced the spiritual discipline of contentment, [blah blah blah] threat to the present order [blah blah blah]."

So here's the story: I work with a bunch of schmucks at a fringe religious group. They barely pay me $44k/year to work 4 days a week with 4 weeks vacation plus health care. That's awesome. I rent my house for $300/mo from my mother who bought it for $48k. I'm 29 and we have 3 kids. For kicks we drink Manhattans out of paper cups in our garage while either reading the Bible or playing fiddle tunes very poorly. I'm not going back to school. I'm not getting my Ph.D. I'm not going to write any books. I'm staying right here.

If I do ever get to do something, may it be because I lived up to what's in front of me now. As Bob Duncan puts it, God gives us the vision and the next step; and as William James puts it:

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.

Ok, thanks for letting me get that off my chest. :^) Feed back to Chad Whitacre.