Understanding Our Diminishing Attention Span

A mini-review of Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

It wasn’t even my copy of the book. And my intention was to just read the first few chapters. But I was hooked. In a world where people have trouble concentrating, the author certainly had my attention.

For regular readers here, this isn’t my usual type of review, which normally concerns books in national release by Christian publishers. Nobody received a review copy, and I don’t have to write this at all. But I feel compelled to recommend this title to anyone who interacts with technology to any degree — hint: you’re reading this on my blog — or anyone who has children, or anyone who simply breathes the air on planet Earth.

Why can’t we pay attention? Why does our mind seem to wander more than it once did? Why does the world suddenly seem filled with a million distractions? I haven’t done a whole lot of reading this on this topic, but my suspicion is that Stolen Focus has got to be one of the more comprehensive books on the subject.

Not content to do phone interviews, Johann Hari spends as much as half the year traveling the world doing research, spending time with the top experts in various branches of education, psychology, the environment, and many other disciplines. (Audio of those interviews is available on a related website.)

There are so many things we could do to re-order our lifestyle to mitigate against where technology has taken us, but ultimately, at the end of the book, he names three. (Sorry, no spoilers.) And no, the problem isn’t Facebook; at least the problem isn’t just Facebook; but when it comes to putting your money where your mouth is, the author does just that, shutting himself off entirely from the internet for three months. The experience changes him dramatically.

That ‘field trip’ also makes the book so much more engaging, as it’s as much about the author’s personal journey with this subject as it is a thoroughly-researched piece of journalism.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari is available in North America in 344-page hardcover from Crown Publishing.

For regular readers here, I suspect there might be some overlap between this book and a Christian title I really wanted to review but simply couldn’t arrange: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. Other recommended Christian books along these lines include The Truth About Us by Brant Hansen, and Your Future Self Will Thank You by Drew Dyck.

Outgunned by Talent and Tech

I was walking through the room we used for coffee and fellowship when I heard it. Lee (or perhaps Leigh) who was a 15-16 year old member of the youth group was sitting at the piano playing the theme song from The Simpsons.

I was the music director. Actually, that’s not true, I was the entire music department. No worship band. No vocal team. Just me. And if you came back the next week, it was me.

The Simpsons theme has an interesting melody and there are some adornments to it which go beyond basic chording. It requires a bit of keyboard competence, whereas my goal with the worship at the church was to keep it singable and engaging, and to use simple chords.

I realized that if this was a sample of his playing, Lee (or perhaps Leigh) was a better pianist than I. But the likelihood of getting him to do something on a Sunday morning was small, and the one time I did get him to do a postlude once. The congregation, instead of heading for the exit in spirited conversation, as they normally did, sat in absolute silence staring, while he turned a shade of red I didn’t know was humanly possible. I think he was traumatized, and he never did do anything else at that church.

Fast forward a few years and I was doing the same thing in another church. Very little talent to draw on, except for Martin, an oboe player. Looking back now, if I had not been juggling so many activities, it would have been nice to write him some actual ‘parts’ for some of the songs, but I was too rushed to consider that.

Again it was me. If you came back the next week it was me. For two-and-a-half years. A recipe for burnout if ever there was one.

Then I found about Dave. He was a classical guitarist. The music he was able to make on his guitar — any guitar really, including a cheap beat-up one that might be laying around — was incredible. It would have added so much to a Sunday morning. But he wasn’t interested in doing anything that would be considered “church music.” Sigh!

There were people with so much talent, so why was I up there, week after week?

These days, I have decided not to try. I’m not so much intimidated by the Lees and the Daves as I am by the technology. Not the simple microphone and mixer stuff, I was after all, the audio technician for a national Christian television show once.

No, I mean the more recent access people have to studio software that allows you to sit in your basement and create multi-layered tracks, add special effects, get friends to do a solo on the bridge and send it to you in an email, and sync the whole thing to a video presentation.

We could only dream of things like that, or pay someone $80 an hour for studio time.

Talk about blogging in your underwear, people can make amazing things under similar conditions. (For the record however, I am wearing shorts and a pullover as I type this.)

Sadly, I didn’t keep up with the tech. A year of virtual choirs has only shown me how much I don’t know, and trying to read tenor and baritone vocal parts (in bass clef) have demonstrated the degree to which my sight reading has atrophied and my vocal range has diminished with respect to high notes or holding notes for a long 12-beat ending.

I tweeted a few days ago something to the effect that today, ‘he who controls the tech controls everything.’ Or she. I no longer feel that I can contribute anything meaningful with respect to instrumentation or vocal harmonies or song selection because I’m a hands-on person who likes to be part of the entire process, and these days, I have to take a back seat to those who are technically more proficient.

And of course, we’re living at a time where all the worship music anyone wants to sing is coming from either Hillsong or Bethel Worship (even the Elevation songs’ publishing is Bethel) and nobody is interested when I talk about a classic hymn, or a metrical Psalm or even a song I heard on YouTube by City Alight. I just don’t have the same passion for what’s being created currently.

If I were parenting a young child, or advising anyone with kids, I would encourage them to get the kid to obtain proficiency on one instrument, but also be spending 25% of their music education time learning all they can about the emerging technology, and how they can take the sounds they produce and build upon them to create things which have heretofore not existed, and get them online to reach people around the world they will never meet in person.

I do sincerely envy those who have mastered the tech. Covid-19 has created a tremendous learning opportunity for those in music ministry, and those skills will still apply long after the masks have been folded and placed in a drawer.

 

 

Google Minus the Minus Sign

Do you use “search” regularly?

Do you get the feeling that the results you see when searching aren’t as good as they once were?

You’re not alone.

My wife sums it up succinctly, “Google no longer tells you what you want to see, they tell you what you should see.”

So how did we get here?

It started many years back when Google removed the minus button. Once upon a time, when you wanted to refine results within a search, you could use the minus button to tell the search engine what you did not want to see.

The guy you’re looking for isn’t the football player with the same name? You would just add “-football” or “-NFL” to your search terms. It wasn’t foolproof, but it definitely worked.

To delve into the science a bit more, Google support Boolean operators which in terms of logic commands consisted of NOT, OR, AND, and phrases placed in QUOTATION marks. So typing three words “in this form” was allowed, until Google announced it wasn’t (But WordPress supports it here on the blog. Feel free to use that to research particular phrases here or at our sister blog, Christianity 201.)

And then the minus sign was removed. And Google Blog search was removed. And a host of other options disappeared as Google decided to place its focus more on commercial website, and especially those who were part of a growing number of people paying to be seen at the top of page one results.

This also applies to the Google-owned platform, YouTube. If the title of the song you’re seeking is the same or almost the same as another much more popular, much more covered song, you are completely out of luck. One time, I took about ten minutes adding search criteria and trying to qualify the particular song title. Eventually I had to do other research to determine the original artist and one other keyword which did the trick.

This morning, I learned that in a January 14th announcement, Google had acquired FitBit, a process begun in November. The price was over $2 billion US. At the same time as federal regulators speak of the need to break up the Google empire, it allows acquisitions like this to go forward. The intrusion on every day life that this creates would have been unfathomable just a few years back. Google now knows when you are sleeping; it knows when you’re awake.

Make no mistake, Google does not provide information to users; it provides eyes and ears to advertisers.

This is so unfortunate because what was once upheld as the great promise of online technology — “when you’ve mastered search you’ve mastered the internet” — has been yanked away from users. There is probably no going back. This tech owns us. You’re no longer in the driver’s seat.

Google is the great sociological experiment and we are the rats. “To know, in order to predict, in order to control;” that goal of sociology playing out on both the micro and macro levels.

The further you can get away from all your devices each day, the better off you will be.

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Related: From just last month, the story of Google’s conflating the image of a good friend with that of a person who died. Click here.

A World of Social Credits

Yesterday Uber Technologies announced changes to its ride-share system insofar as it is affected by ratings that passengers give its drivers, and the drivers give the passengers.

It prompted the announcer on the talk radio station that’s on when I drive home to be reminded of an episode of Black Mirror in which every single interaction is tied to a rating system, including such trivial things as paying for your fuel at the self-serve station or picking up milk at the convenience store. People are constantly identified and the rating is quickly punched in at the conclusion of each transaction. Things like being a blood donor are obviously weighted higher for consideration of a person’s social credit score.

Early on in the episode, a woman goes to rent a car only to be told something like, “We only rent to sevens or higher.” She must then try to find away around the system, and my wife, who has seen the episode, says at that point the story gets darker.

I have always liked — and often used — the Max Headroom phrase “20 minutes into the future.” From my perspective, many of the things science fiction dreams of happening in a very distant future are often, relatively speaking, just minutes away from being reality.

Anything transactional in a goods-and-services sense always reminds people of the words of Revelation 13:

It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.

When BankAmericard and MasterCharge (today’s VISA and MasterCard) were first introduced in the U.S. some Evangelicals claimed this was the forerunner of the mark of the beast. (The same, but to a lesser degree, in the UK with the introduction of Barclaycard.) It was a similar reaction when UPC barcodes were introduced — somewhere I have a prototype print of the circular type of barcode that was never used — and then the same discussion once again when microchips for dogs and cats were first made available.

But each of these discussions focuses on the how of the technology, but not so much on the what.

What if your ability to conduct transactions isn’t determined so much by how much is in your account or the limit of your available credit, but instead by other factors, such as the social credits? What if, like the woman in the TV show, you can’t rent the vehicle for reasons other than financial? Uber stated that below a certain point customers may stop having access to the Uber app. People were calling in with opening lines such as, “Hi, my name is Dan and I’m a 4.87.”

The talk radio hosts spring-boarded to a discussion of Uber and Lyft drivers refusing to take people to certain destinations. What if your car breaks down and your conservative fundamentalist Uber driver refuses to take you to Joel Osteen’s church? Or what if the atheist driver refuses to pick you up at Saddleback to give you a ride home? (And why are they working on Sunday?) What if the fish on the back of your car caused you to be down-rated by people you weren’t even dealing with at arm’s length?

I would argue that the potential for market disruption — not to mention blatant discrimination — here is huge, and the insidiousness of it makes the issue of bakers refusing to bake wedding cakes for certain customers look tame by comparison. 

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Update: There’s a reader comment below that bears highlighting. The link is to a New York Post story from May 18th which begins:

Imagine calling a friend. Only instead of hearing a ring tone you hear a police siren, and then a voice intoning, “Be careful in your dealings with this person.”

Would that put a damper on your relationship? It’s supposed to.

Welcome to life in China’s “Social Credit System,” where a low score can ruin your life in more ways than one…

 

I Want to Fly the Plane

The plane which took us to Cuba last month. WestJest was one of the airlines affected by the Boeing Max 8 grounding this week.

Last night I received an email which had been flagged by Gmail (a division of Google) as being suspicious because the person who sent it to me appeared to be sending it from an email address which he had not used before. Actually, I know this guy, and he has about four different email addresses.

I carried my phone downstairs where my wife was working and I said that frankly, I thought this was none of their business. I am intelligent enough to look at the content and decide if there’s anything malicious in it.

Earlier in the day I had shared with her a discussion I heard on talk radio suggesting that the problem in the Ethiopian Air crash as well as the one in Indonesia might possibly have been caused by systems related to the autopilot function. Their pilots lack the training of their North American equivalents, probably due to the rise in affluence in countries allowing more people to fly, resulting in the need for many more skilled personnel. For such instances the autopilot is usually a blessing…

More and more it seems that the machines are taking over, not only in terms of function, but also in terms of doing our thinking for us. The on-air reporter was suggesting that the pilots and the countries concerned, simply need to get the plane up in the air and then let the computer take over. When something goes wrong, they lack the necessary skills to know how to fix the problem correctly and so they jerk the nose of the plane back up, resulting in a stall. As far as the investigation goes, these are early days, so it’s hard to know how the accuracy of that analysis.

Needless to say this causes me concern when it comes to self driving cars.

One thing that the airline story accomplishes is that it gives me the language necessary to say what irritates me most about my computer and my phone:

I want to fly the plane.

I want to be the one in charge. I want to decide for myself. I don’t want everything to do with my email and my social media and the business use of my computer to be run for me are to be on autopilot. Your paragraph

On Monday, I sent out a newsletter using the MailChimp program. I had to override the from address because the one it has stored as default is actually incorrect and the service won’t let me change it. Each time I type the address I got a large red warning sign telling me that my address lacks an at sign and that furthermore when I get to the point where I type it in it then gets upset but I am lacking the .com portion of the address.

There’s no way of telling the machine that I have a brain, but if it just gives me another two seconds I will type a completely usable address.

I want to fly the plane.

But more importantly I want to know why in a generation that is increasingly being taught computer coding we have to let these autopilot systems do everything for us. Eventually the machines will reach a complexity where are the humans will simply not be able to do the necessary overriding when necessary.

This is what many believe happened in the recent air crashes and it’s unfortunate if that is the case.

“This is just what this generation does, Mom.”

Checking our archives, I realized it’s been awhile since I posted something from Diane Lindstrom, who blogs faithfully, since 2010, at Nice One Nana. We don’t normally poach the pictures which go with material we steal, and she didn’t cite the source for this, but hey, in for a penny, in for a pound, right? I know the scenario is nothing new, but it’s her daughter’s response which got me; an attempt to normalize or justify behavior that seems so (using the first words which come to mind) bleak and hopeless. Or zombie-like. I just wanna scream, ‘Hey! What’s the matter with you people?’

Completely Inattentive

Two young women and two young men (mid 20’s) sat at the table next to us in the restaurant.

As soon as they got comfortable, out came their phones.

They did not say a word to each other.

The waitress came, the phone gawkers gruffly gave their orders and then went right back to staring at their phones.

They still didn’t say a word to each other.

About fifteen minutes after ordering, they gestured the waitress to come over to their table and then proceeded to complain about having to wait too long for their meals.

Shortly after complaining, their four meals came and they ate very quickly.

Not one word between them. They looked at their phones through their entire meal.

UNBELIEVABLE. 

Seriously. Who comes all the way to a beautiful resort surrounded by majestic mountains and capped with crystal blue skies – and stares at their phone???

My daughter Danae tells me, “This is just what this generation does, Mom.”

I don’t get it. I guess I’m getting old.  I just can’t imagine doing this.

The thing is, I don’t ever WANT to do this.

Rant over. 🙂

Social Media: What It’s Doing to Us

Some of you may have seen this on Facebook.

That’s rather ironic; since it does not paint the social media platform favorably.

The timing on this is interesting, since I was planning to write about this topic anyway. I’m not opposed to technology, nor do I resent the application of social networking. Rather, I was going to write something like, “I just want to go back in time and use the internet as it was in 2003.” That’s right; 15 years ought to do it.

Anyway, see what you think. Someone put some thought into this, but it hasn’t had many views and no public comments as of yesterday. (Perhaps this isn’t the original post.)

Changing the Way We Think About Thinking

Originally published in 2013, shortly after I joined Twitter, under the title, “A Picture Replaces 1,000 Words.”

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Several months in, I have to say that I’m enjoying Twitter. But I also despair over all the things the new technology has wrought in terms of reducing literacy.

• Twitter forces us to compress a message to 140 characters; usually Tweets are sentence fragments.
• Texting forces us to compress words, resulting in thngs which aren’t really wrds at all.
• Spell-check means that in many cases, the computer itself is filling out and completing our thoughts. Spell-check is on, weather you want it or knot. I think you no where I’m coming form on this point. (Yep, no mistakes there!)
• Facebook tends to be absorbed with the minutiae of our lives, with little regard for the interest others might have in such trivia, hence a major loss of depth. Left to continue for a generation, we may forget how not to be shallow.
  
• Tumblr and Pinterest rely entirely on visuals. So while it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture replaces a thousand words. I don’t buy a second car and write about the year, make and model, my trip to the dealer, or who owned the car previously, or why we needed it; I simply post a phone-quality resolution photo with the caption, “Bought this today.” Yes, but what is it?
  
• That said, isn’t it interesting that the cell phone or mobile phone, designed for communication now contains a camera? What does this say about our preferred mode of transmitting our thoughts and informing others as to our activities?
  
• A culture of “copy and paste” means we often parrot the words of others without personalization. We re-Tweet, re-blog and regurgitate what a few key communicators are saying without including any personal editorial comments, to the point that often others wonder if we’re agreeing or disagreeing.
  
• What verbal communication that remains tend to be more oral than written. We are rapidly moving from literacy to orality, not unlike many more primitive societies in remote parts of the world.

What does all this mean to those of us whose priority in life is to follow Christ?

• Attention spans are being rapidly diminished; we need to rethink all manner of Christian communication, both in terms of online activity, but also simple things like how preaching happens or how small groups are led.
• At the same time, we have to be willing to contribute to the glut of communication taking place. We have a message to bring, a message we want shared.
• We need people to construct eye-arresting visuals (both static images and motion video content) that communicate the truth of scripture.
• We need to engage a greater use of story to capture the attention of people over the duration of longer narratives.
• We need to affirm our position as readers, the thing that separates us from animals. Therefore we need to model this for our children, and then having set an example, keep our kids supplied with age-appropriate books of all kinds, both fiction and non-fiction, faith-focused and general-interest.
• Similarly, we need to passionate about thought about ideas. We need to allow ourselves immersion into what key writers and leaders are saying.
  
• Everyone writing online needs to practice a greater level of concision. This is somewhat related to the first priority; we need to get our message across more efficiently.
• While the message of the Gospel is simple enough that we can receive it as a child, we need to be careful not to lose an appreciation of the intricacies and complexity of scripture. We need to approach God’s word as a multi-faceted jewel and examine at different angles to see the refractions and reflections it produces.
  

The Essential Art of Concision

Church sharing times should never begin with a request to "keep it short" because short is a relative term; to Mrs. Talespinner it means anything under 20 minutes.

— Paul Wilkinson (@PaulW1lk1nson) November 8, 2017

I debated between calling this “The Lost art of Concision” versus “The Developing Art of Concision.” First, a definition is in order:

Therefore, when I speak of the concision as a developing art, I mean the necessity of being able to put ideas across in a short-and-to-the-point manner; something you need in a world of soundbites. Last year I wrote,

It was Noam Chomsky who introduced me to the idea of concision. I’ve taught it as, “You’re selling your car through a media which is charging you $1.50 per word. How do you describe your vehicle persuasively, but keep the cost down?”

But when I speak of it as a dying art, I’m thinking specifically of the migration of many bloggers from what I’m doing now — typing/writing words — to podcasting; and to Twitter’s decision to gift everyone with 140 additional characters on Tuesday evening.

Twitter is obsessed with the number 140. (Originally videos were limited to 2 minutes and 20 seconds, which is 140 seconds.)  The new length, 280 characters, doubles this even though 160 would have been a nice gift in itself. Or 180 or 200. 280 seems long, it seems to rob Twitter of it’s basic character, heretofore. But I didn’t always feel that way. When I joined, I wrote:

I can’t say what I have to say in 140 characters.

In case you missed it, I tend to write long.

But the word concision has come up on this blog somewhat frequently. Earlier this year I wrote,

I have for a long time questioned how much time sermon has left.  With all due respect to those of you currently honing your homiletic craft at either the undergraduate or graduate level, I really think that this particular form is destined to go the way of the CD or the land line phone. I’m not saying there aren’t some great preachers out there; I spend my evening hours listening to sermon after sermon online. But that’s me. For others there are a host of reasons why sermon doesn’t work. ADD or ADHD comes to mind. Some sermons are simply too long. Some say it’s just not how they learn. Some claim that high profile Christian pastors have simply set the bar too high and average pastors can’t achieve the quality that is now widely available online. Others would argue that we’ve become accustomed to media bursts, sound bites, and increased concision.

The Bible itself is amazingly concise. Readers are often fascinated to learn how narratives they had heard about — Creation, Jonah, The Prodigal Son — when they actually got around to reading them, were expressed in a very limited fashion. In an article about Christ’s ascension the subject was raised (pun intended):

A reader wrote, “We’re told… at his ascension that he will come again in like manner as they have seen him go.” But what do we know about that manner? How long were the disciples staring as he rose into the sky? Was there a low cloud ceiling that day? The Bible’s tendency to brevity and concision makes me think that perhaps God didn’t just beam Jesus up, but his ascension may have have been more prolonged; a vertical processional to heaven.

It also came up in a piece on diminishing attention spans:

You see this in the way books and articles in periodicals are written now; in fact you’re seeing it in the piece you’re presently reading. Pick up an older book — say 60 years or more old — and you might find an entire page consisting of a single paragraph. You might even find several consecutive pages consisting of a single paragraph. (I’m told that some chapters of Paul’s epistles were often a single sentence in the original Greek, no doubt a weaving of dominant and subordinate clauses that the reader of that time would follow easily.)

Today we use paragraph breaks to keep the content flowing; to keep the eyes moving on the page; to force us writers to adopt a greater degree of concision. Our writing is also broken up by more numbered or alphanumeric lists, by bullet points, by sub-headers and by pull quotes. (We use them often at Christianity 201, where the devotions are by definition somewhat longer, and we want to make what would otherwise be an entire page of text more interesting.)

The trend towards podcasting is actually surprising, given the push toward brevity in a bullet-point world. Have you ever thought of what a full transcript of your favorite podcast would look like printed out? It would run for pages and pages. A blog post on a similar topic would be less than 2,000 words, and easily digested in under 7 minutes. (Or spoken in 15 minutes. Compare word length to spoken time at this speech minutes converter.)  We wrote about podcasts on an article on the trend from literacy to orality:

Inherent in podcasting is the right to ramble. Listeners get the nuance that’s missing in a traditional blog post (and this is one of the great liabilities of email) but they have to take the time to wade through the host(s) stream-of-consciousness narration. There’s no concision, a quality that decades ago Noam Chomsky had predicted would be, moving forward, a key asset in communications. A great concept that’s probably a seven or eight paragraph blog post instead becomes a 53 minute podcast.  Andy Warhol’s comment that “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes;” might be modified to, “In the 21st century, everyone will have their own talk show or be the host of their own radio station.” 

As Christian communicators however, we have to be careful when we try to reduce to mystery or complexity of the gospel to a concise motto, slogan, tag line or formula. In an article titled What is the Gospel, I wrote,

I also think that, when considered in the light of the Jewish appreciation of the scriptures as a great jewel that reflects and refracts the light in infinite ways each time we look at it, the idea of trying to formulate a precis of the Bible is to venture into an endless and perhaps even frustrating mission. What would Jesus think of trying to consolidate something so great, so wide, so high, so deep into a finite number of words?  Concision is great, but maybe it doesn’t work here.

Anyway Twitter, thanks for the extra characters; but I earnestly hope I have the wisdom to not overuse them. Readers, it’s a busy world out there; keep it short!

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Yes, today I basically quoted myself throughout this article. To further embellish Chomsky’s teaching on concision would have made the article…well…not so concise.

For those mystified by the final graphic image, TL/DR stands for Too long, didn’t read.

For further reference in thinking about the difference between podcasting and blogging, this article is less than 1,100 words; you can halve the minutes in the above example.

 

What You Don’t See Just By Looking at the Amish

I don’t know offhand if the Amish permit what’s called here “Agritourism” — in other words farm tours — but I have something that would be of greater interest than seeing the hay lofts or furniture making workshop. I’d like to sit down with an Amish elder and discuss the underlying faith, specifically their faith and how it informs their customers. It beats driving around Lancaster, PA and going, “Over there! It’s another one!” and then snapping camera-phone pictures of these precious people simply trying to live their lives in peace.

This week, I got a bit of an insight into the type of information I’m seeking. I work two days a week at a Christian bookstore that my wife and I coincidentally happen to own. When an audio book came in missing the shrink-wrap usually found on audio products¹ I considered the idea of listening to a few minutes of it as, despite the various podcasts and sermons I listen to constantly, I have no personal experience with audio books.

Then I discovered the book was voiced by none other than Christian Taylor, one of the regulars at The Phil Vischer Podcast.² I decided to see (or hear) what her vocational labor produced.

The audio was for the book Amish Peace: Simple Wisdom for a Complicated World by Susanne Woods Fisher.³ Interspersing Amish proverbs with anecdotal stores would make this a fun read, but it was probably a bit of a challenge voicing a reading of the book.

Putting it as simply as I can, there is a world here which, while it may seem strikingly different to observe as a tourist, is actually more different than you think in terms of the underlying principles which guide everyday life in an Amish family and an Amish community.  They live out an ethic which is certainly rooted in the Sermon on the Mount and other teachings of Jesus, but in many respects almost goes beyond that high standard in terms of everyday life.⁴

Even if I could embed myself in an Amish family for a week, I don’t know that I could ever expect to fully get it without having spent a lifetime being educated and shaped by their community values, passed on from generation to generation. They live in a world without electronic media and yet possess a wisdom many of the rest of us cannot imagine. Their formal education ends at Grade 8, yet they have better literacy rates than in other neighboring rural areas. Their children are given responsibilities that would boggle the minds of parents who bubble-wrap their kids in the cities, such as driving a team of mules to plow a field.⁵ And their pace of life means they see things which the rest of miss while driving Interstate freeways at 70 mph.

I enjoyed the (audio) book, but I find myself wanting more; more than I can get from simply packing up the car and heading off to Amish country or Mennonite country to simply look at them.⁶

I want to take a month and be them.⁷

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¹To my readers in other countries: For years records, tapes and CDs in North America have come plastic-wrapped, as we don’t want to get to get germs, at least that’s what a record vendor in England told me years ago.

²As in “…We’ll talk to Skye and Christian, too, but we’ve got no guest this week for you…” (Show theme song.) Christian is a voice actor. christiantaylorvo.com

³Oops! Fisher wrote Amish Peace in 2009. In an earlier version of this blog post, I identified the book as The Heart of the Amish which she wrote in 2015. This appears to be a different book, not a title update. My bad.

⁴The stories about forgiveness will break you.

⁵Full disclosure: The book admits this freedom results in a much higher rate of Emergency Room visits due to injuries compared to other children in rural areas.

⁶Pennsylvania or Ohio or Western Ontario would be the destinations of choice for such an excursion. The book notes the Ohio Amish have a lower percentage of people living in farm communities.

⁷I would probably not be able to give up my phone or internet connection. Today, several houses share an outdoor phone booth of sorts which is for making calls, not receiving them. That would be somewhat insufficient.

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Christian responds:

Wow. Thank you for letting me know! I didn’t think anyone ever listened to those! That means a lot and makes me so happy!

— Christian Taylor (@ChristiansVoice) October 3, 2017

Related: A 2010 article I wrote about the Amish and the concept of being separated from the world.

Photos: Daily Encouragement by Stephen & Brooksyne Weber.