What do you do when you get where you’re going?

Education is important, but football is importanter – so they tell me!

I think we’ve lost our way in the Western education model, and would make a stand for the Classic Liberal education over and against the merely pragmatic, which is what drives most of our education today. This is why we’re good at say, the mechanical, the industrial, the practical. We have amazing machines that enable us to live life with an ease unknown just a generation ago. But then the question is….

….What do you do when your machine or gadget has saved you time, got you where you need to be, completed the tasks, or whatever?

What do you do when the practical things have done their job? And now you’re ready to savour. We live in such a fast paced world, it’s a certain cliche to even say that, we all know it, we have hurry sickness, labour saving devices everywhere, and no time. So the Washing machine is washing the clothes, and you zoom off in the car to get somewhere quick – OK, so now you’re there – now what?

Some people, live fast, they whizz around like they really are full of important things to do, almost as if their life depends on it, and they get to the place they’re going, they get with their freinds and – tragedy – they don’t know how to have a cultivated, meaningful, deep, heart-to-heart conversation. They don’t know how to rest.

The word “rest” is a trip-wire word for many of us. We think it simply means lounging around by the pool with drinks brought by the waiter (as noce as that is). The word “rest” has, in Latin, the sense of savouring. In Latin the word means requiem, and is often used at funerals. So when we say, “May he rest in peace” we don’t mean, “May he lie in a hammock by the pool forever”, but rather, “May he now savour the beauty and goodness of God” – thus linking the idea of rest with the abundant life promised by Jesus.

Our culture is chasing the abundant life in the things of consumerism and leisure. But because our chase is illigitimate, i.e. a replacement for God, we don’t know how to rest in things, because when we, go go go with every second of life, we lose the art of knowing what to do when we get their. A refocus of our educational priorities will address this malaise, and instead of producing children to be consumers on a conveyer belt like a factory produces sausages, we must reclaim the idea of a liberal classical education, then we will relearn what we are to do when we get wherever there is, and savour the good, the true and the beautiful, which is to say, God.