Your Worst Life Now
The Greats got interrupted too
Featuring Josh Nadeau in the Other Ways of Being series.
IF A TREE FALLS in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, am I a loser?
If your kid flushes a silicon travel bottle, if you have to shut off the water, drain the tank, flip the toilet over, replace the wax seal, and no one is filming it for an Instagram reel, will you ever make it?
That’s what’s on your mind when the porcelain is laying sideways on your tile floor. When your socks are wet. When what you’re supposed to be doing is writing the next best-selling Christian nonfiction.
My three year old is now my errand boy, fetching towels, my ratchet set, and my needlenose pliers. But what’s on your mind is if the Greats ever had to do this. If they ever got irrationally frustrated with their wives because of looming deadlines and ordinary, everyday interruptions. Your breath is the heavy sighs of being inconvenienced, but what you see is the bright wonder in your kid’s eyes.
Experiencing a rite of passage: Helping Dad fix something.
Did the Greats ever have to apologize because they were idiots missing the real life right in front of them? Or were they losers, like me?
What you have to do before you get back to it, your art and your craft, is shower off all the anger and the dirt and all the ways you missed it. Life, I mean. Missed it because of selfishness.
The shower storms, dripping off your shoulders and back, and you try to call the frustration “disordered loves”, or an “inverted hierarchy of values.” But what it really is, when you cut all the self-protecting spirituality away, is selfishness. Towelling off, pulling on a hoodie and jeans, what’s on your mind is life. What makes it matter?
Mastery? Being seen? Is my self-worth directly proportional to likes on a post?
Your pen is where you left it, lid off and resting on your (empty) open notebook. And what you do, instead of writing that generational manuscript, is wonder how you got into this pickle in the first place. This idea that real life is an interruption. What you do, while trying to get back into the headspace of a writer, is wonder about this crisis of selfishness. Of needing to become something.
Because, of course, the only way to write anything worth reading is to be as separated as possible from the very ordinary and very human. From kids and toilets, and the rest of the embodied practices through which love, virtue, and beauty are formed. Because the only real way to connect with people is by growing frustrated with ordinary, everyday life.
As trucks and trains smash away at your office door, as the metronome of your tapping pen wastes away your day, what’s on your mind is this modern “medicine": Connection. Opportunity. A New and Virtual world. To live your life in virtual spaces, gain a platform, have influence, without all the bodies and toilets.
And what you wonder is, am I a loser?
THE ROOF LIGHTS are casting three orange cones on the dark, wooden deck. Cutting against a lonely cobalt evening. Five of us sitting in those fold-up fabric lawn chairs.
“I feel outside of my life.”
The smoke from my cigarette dances in the orange, and my friend goes on:
“Like I’m watching it all pass me by. Not being able to enjoy it.”
My mouth inhales the crackling hot nicotine, and someone starts to answer. But this guy, the one outside his life, has his phone out. He’s nodding like he’s listening, but his face is lit up in silicon dreams. His eyes darting up to us and falling back into the glow.
Connected. But to what?
The moon is flirting with vespertine clouds, and my friend, the one with all the problems, is telling us about how his wife keeps pressing him, telling him that he’s not present.
“What else can I give?” he asks.
And what you want to say is, attention. But it’s not that kind of night, and, well, he’s already back on that phone. No one says anything for a moment. The chairs creak when someone shifts weight, but even they’re silent. Evening sings a nocturne; my smoke rises and the moon reveals herself. Cars hum and hiss on backroads. He is not with us, and we are all watching. Life is happening just beyond him. He is no-where.
You get to see, up close, what a primarily virtual life does:
Thins out your presence. Delays your attention. Defers your love. It disembodies you. The virtual still forms you, of course, but not to exist in the real, wide world. It removes you. It places you no-where. Prepares you for nothing.
Love silence above all things, for it brings you fruit which the tongue cannot describe. — Saint Isaac the Syrian
STANDING BEFORE this giant maple, axe in hand, someone calls out:
“It’s all in the hips.” And they’re swivelling in place.
Like that helps. The first swing is like hitting a brick wall. All the force ricocheting back through the axe, up my arms, rattling my skull. Just a fleck of bark cut away.
“More hips!” He calls out, and then he leans to the man beside him, “He’s gonna feel that tomorrow.”
The second swing is the same. It’s mid morning, already a million degrees, and these guys are getting me to cut down my first tree. Ever. They say that my eleven-year-old hands need some callouses and that the pinch and squeeze of the axe will do it.
“Girls love callouses, kid.”
One. Two. Three more swings. My own eleven years against the hundred of this maple. Waiting for the wooden armour to give way. Four. Five. Six. Sweat skittering down my neck like a dozen insects. (If a tree falls in a forest, and it was me who did it, will the girls give me a kiss?) Seven. Eight. Nine. My hands feel glued to this axe. Like one of David’s Mighty Men.
“Now cut in angles.” The other one calls out. “First angle down, like this. The next swing, chop up.”
What you want to tell your folks, over dinner, is that me—their first born–well, lucky them. I cut down a tree. So you swing at the tree and it hits back with all its immovable ardour. Over and over. And what it does is change you. Your mind. Your grip. You imagine this is why lumberjacks are so lumbering. The trees and the axe shape them.
These things, the changes, you can’t buy them. You can’t simply add them to your life. They’re grown into. Like all Good things.
You want to be Good? Healed? Whole? There are no shortcuts. Chainsaws won’t get you there, if you know what I mean. Healing can’t be made efficient, it can’t be optimized. It has to be lived, worked into your body over time. A body slowly learning to love what is Real and being transformed by the process.
Man’s body is deified at the same time as his soul.
— Saint Maximos the Confessor
WHEN I THINK ABOUT this modern world, the selfish one—captured by screens and algorithms, trained to turn identity into a purchased product—my mind goes to the monks and their pilgrimages. In the Christian East, virtue is seen as a healing medicine. Vices have antidotes. Our soul sicknesses have treatments.
What we need to be asking, then, is this: What happens to a soul constantly on display? On a digital stage? What happens to its desires? Its sense of virtue?
If our sickness is a need to be seen or be significant, then our medicine is the virtue of humility. And not the performative kind, sharing about how you’re “Taking a break from socials.” Not another stage. Not self-deprecation, either.
The real deal. Withdrawal. Silence. Hiddenness.
Saint John Climacus says in The Ladder of Divine Ascent:
“Humility is a nameless grace in the soul, its name known only to those who have learned it by experience.”
Humility isn’t something you obtain or mentally ascend to. Humility is a way of life you make room for and express. And as far as I can tell, it only really grows in secret. If a tree falls in the forest, kind of thing.
AFTER THE TOILET FIASCO, the family got sick. Before kids, healing was easy. A sick day, a Hot Toddy, a mini hibernation. And about twenty-four hours later: poof! Good as new. But now? It’s about a week of sickly sleeplessness. And you want to keep going. Work hard. Think clear. Write that next best-seller. The spirit is willing. The flesh? Infirmed.
My desk at seven in the morning is groggy, like me. We’ve both been up for a few hours and that blank page gets inked at the pace of my limitation. A man broken by lack of sleep. You’d think, with all this technological advancement, with however many thousands of years of innovation, God would have given us Body 2.0. Fewer bugs. Updated drivers. A way around all this fleshly resistance.
Unless, of course, He’s after something else.
The limits of the body do not delay healing. Instead, our limitations are invitations into Divine Life, right where we need it most: in the sleepless, angry, impatient, unseen, frayed edges of ordinary life.
Theosis: healing the human person by participating in the Divine. Bodies and souls made new.
God became man, so that man might become god. — Saint Athanasius
IF A TREE FALLS in the forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, that’s okay. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.
If a toilet is flipped, if a child learns the weight of a tool, if a body, and a soul, learn slow, slow, slow, the cost of growth, well, maybe these aren’t interruptions. Maybe they don’t need a stage.
Your Father who sees what’s done in secret will reward you.
And maybe the reward is less crowns, less milk and honey, and maybe it’s more human. Maybe it’s embodied.
This efficient, selfish digital world, with all its virtual ways of (non)being, forces itself upon us all. Seduces us. Disorders our loves. Inverts our hierarchy of values. Forms us through separation. From ourselves. From each other. From Christ.
But the embodied life, the very human and ordinary life, must move beyond mere aesthetics. It is an antidote. It drives us back into Reality, where our desires can be trained, and shaped, and directed. This way of being allows us to heal from the scars of all this separation—the meaninglessness, the loneliness, the need to be seen—at the pace of habituating love. As virtue forms who we are, and becomes our response to the interruptions and obstacles of the everyday, we are made new.
To find healing is to embrace the truly human way of being, with its limitations. Digital substitutes will not do the trick. I see a world desperate for this healing, looking to digital cisterns that hold no water. And I see them ignoring humility, hiddenness, and silent devotion.
And then there’s my toilet tipped sideways, my real deal, ordinary life. What I see there is an invitation to find healing. Inside my sickness and limits, inside my exhaustion and interruptions. Inside every single joy and sorrow.
To become human, again.
📰 Read in print: Here’s the link to a quick tool for those who want to get their hands on this essay and read it analog style.
Josh Nadeau
Writer & Artist
Josh is the artist behind Sword and Pencil and is the founder of Every Day Saints. He is also the author of Room for Good Things to Run Wild and Heaven Meets Earth.
📸 Photo & GIFs by Haydin Olivia
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