Article

Attention

Change

Joy

30 May 2023

4 min read

Life lessons from the pup

A new arrival reminds Natalie Garrett how to learn much about a life of simplicity and joy.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

Life coaching can be tiring.

So finally, we caved. We bought the puppy. We had been strong and resolute in our parenting decision to say no in the face of almost daily requests over a period of probably three years. But when we moved out of London recently, we relented and got a puppy.

We have had him for nearly a month now. He’s 98 per cent fluff and utterly glorious. He is taking us back to the early days of having our own human puppies – you mustn’t let him out of your sight for a second or he’ll a) be literally under your feet so you tread on him, b) be eating something disgusting you didn’t know was hiding under the sofa or c) well, you can guess what c) is.

But what I hadn’t reckoned on, when I collected this beautiful ball of snuffliness from his breeder, was that he would turn into my life coach. I have learnt so much about life – and specifically how to live it well – in the last couple of weeks, just by watching the way he lives his life.

For our puppy, everything is an adventure.

“Someone’s opening a door! What excitement awaits on the other side?”

“Oh you’ve leant down to talk to me – maybe if I lie on my back, you will give my tummy a rub?”

And so on.

Occasionally, he expresses sadness because everyone’s left the room and he can’t follow us upstairs. But otherwise, his glass (or bowl) isn’t just half full, it’s brimming over. As long as he’s been fed, he’s warm, he’s been let out to do what a dog’s got to do and (most importantly) he’s been shown love and affection, he’s happy and trusting. And then falls asleep, paws akimbo.

Somewhere, I read that in the Bible there are 365 statements variously translated as “do not worry”, “do not be afraid”, “do not be anxious”. 365. One for every day of the year. And even if that rather neat number isn’t actually accurate (although how amazing if it were true), clearly the Bible has a recurring theme around worry, fear and anxiety. Perhaps this most human of conditions is not such a new phenomenon as we think. God has been addressing issues of mental health for hundreds and thousands of years.

Jesus talked about it a lot. He addressed it head on in one of his most famous teaching sessions:

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?’

In my puppy, I see (mercifully not a bird flying around) a creature who trusts that he’s going to be looked after. He trusts that he will have food and love so he is free to enjoy chasing a ball or chewing a stick. He models to me the very wisdom of Jesus. He doesn’t overcomplicate his life, he just lives it. As people, we seem to experience life as endlessly complicated. And, of course, sometimes it really is. Some of us carry all sorts of responsibilities that are very complicated indeed. Some of us don’t have our most basic needs met and that’s awful. I pray we can find and help those around us in that situation. But for most of us, most of the time, life really isn’t that complicated. If we have enough food, clothes on our back, somewhere warm to shelter and someone to share love with, that’s a good life right there. If we are privileged to have our basic needs provided for then maybe we can worry less and enjoy more. But for some reason, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Like countless others, I have carried with me the shadow of depression for many years. Through CBT and other therapies, I have had to learn new ways of thinking to keep the light on, as it were, and the darkness at bay. In this battle, Jesus’ words provide powerful ballast against the tidal waves of the depressive storm. He encourages us to choose, by an act of will, to fill our minds with truth and with the evidence of good things: the promise of his faithful provision, thus forcing out the lies of the darkness. As we choose to fill our minds with the knowledge and love of God, there is less room for worry and anxiety and we find rest for our minds. This choice brings freedom and the space for joy to grow. And, as we have come to realise in recent years, this battle is real for all of us, in different ways and to different extents.

Wonderfully, my puppy seems to have excellent mental health. When Winston Churchill spoke of his own “black dog”, I don’t think he was talking about a bouncing ball of fur begging for a tummy rub. But as I fill my mind with thoughts of Jesus and my puppy, I will continue to learn much about a life of simplicity and joy. And I am grateful to my children, wise beyond their years, who were instrumental in bringing this puppy/life coach into our family.

Article

Attention

Culture

Digital

Easter

5 March 2025

4 min read

Let your mind wander if you want to make the most of Lent

How to escape the cold and bitter tunnels of digital distraction.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A montage image places a woman, with eyes shut and hands on hip, at the centre of blurred circle of ground and tree branches.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

According to Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French polymath: all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

And now, four hundred years later, we have proof of how hard we find this.

Researchers carried out an experiment, putting several people in a room on their own with nothing else to do but sit there for fifteen minutes. A majority admitted feeling uncomfortable with little but their thoughts to console them. The experiment was repeated, only this time an instrument was placed in the room that could administer an unpleasant electric shock. In the fifteen-minute period, one in four women self-administered the shock to relieve the boredom. Two in three men did.

There is a chance we draw the wrong conclusions from social experiments because it is hard to get into the minds of others, but we can make a good guess here. Our lives are over-stimulated. To be alone in a room with our thoughts for any length of time is unusual to the point of weird. We don’t need to live like this. Our smartphones are the ‘rod and staff which comfort us’. Any spare moment can be spent using TikTok, Instagram or Spotify.

As people age, they tend to think the world is losing its attention span without realising that focus declines as we grow older. But something seems to have changed in the last two decades. A whole new digital architecture has been designed that wasn’t there. It creates the buzz of the city but has gone up around us like skyscrapers, creating cold shadows and bitter wind tunnels of anger and distraction that block out the warmth.

This new online city is intentionally designed to keep our attention; to prevent us from doing anything offline. And it is working. Between 2010 and 2020, globally, we consumed twenty times more information. This is a colossal increase for our brains to cope with in the blink of an evolutionary eye. Our minds have become less like the cool, white minimalist interior design people aspire to in life and more like the junk garage where broken and pointless stuff is tipped.

According to Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, we tend to blame ourselves for this state of affairs. After all, if we tell others our smartphone is distracting us, the answer we get back is to turn it off. While we can take steps like this, Hari says it lets tech companies off the hook. As with shopaholics, there is individual responsibility, but there is also the edifice of consumer capitalism designed to make us buy more stuff or absorb more information.

Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention. It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.

When we consider what it means to follow Jesus today, we often do not appreciate what tech is doing to us. The gains are obvious – having the world at our fingertips, being able to talk to family and friends in an instant – but the losses remain obscure. How does digital distraction affect reading of the Bible and a commitment to prayer? There is little research on this, but we may be giving God less devoted attention than before. In flitting from one source to another, like a fly on a hot summer’s day, we do not stay long enough in one place to discover if God is waiting for us there.

Prompts from God frequently emerge outside the thinking of the Church. A cohort of Silicon Valley tech wizards has come up with the idea of the digital Sabbath, where people spend one day a week unplugged. Though describing themselves as not especially religious, their manifesto practically drowns in religious tradition. They advise people to:

Avoid technology
Connect with loved ones
Nurture your health
Get outside
Avoid commerce
Light candles
Drink wine
Eat bread
Find silence
Give back

It is sabbath re-imagined for the digital era.

Johann Hari also lists some practical actions that can be taken, like staying on task and limiting exposure to social media in particular as it is shown to be bad for mental health in large doses. We should also allow our minds to wander. This does not contradict the argument about not losing focus. Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention. It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.

When the prophet Elijah meets with God at Mount Horeb, there is first a strong wind, then a powerful earthquake and lastly a raging fire. But God does not reveal himself in these gripping phenomena. He is to be found in the sheer silence which follows; in the whisper of a voice.

The sheer silence today is broken by the familiar buzz of a news feed or social media update – or the shock of an electric current. The moment we move out of earshot of the faint audio of the divine.

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