The other night, my son and I attended a Toledo Walleye hockey game. With seats near the ice, we had a close view of goals being scored, pucks flying by, and players slamming one another into the glass.
There were thousands of people sitting with us, watching a handful of people skating around the ice, playing hockey.
On any given weekend, millions of Americans sit in stadiums and arenas around the country or in front of their televisions watching various sporting events. Others binge on Netflix, play video games for hours, or scroll through their Facebook feeds.
None of these things are inherently bad, but I wonder how often we trade living our own lives for watching other people live theirs.
I write these words not with an accusatory finger pointing out, but with a reflective glance in the mirror.
When I spend a few hours watching a football game on TV, I could use that time walking in nature. When we spend hours streaming TV shows and movies, we could use that time to sit with family and friends and visit. When we fill our time with video games or social media, we rob ourselves of time to be still.
This is about balance, not asceticism, priorities, not prohibitions. It’s about making sure we don’t entertain ourselves right out of living life.
This is a very real struggle for me. There is nothing wrong with moments of rest and recreation involving television, a sporting event, or some other form of entertainment. But there are times it’s too much. And if I’m honest, there are times I use the noise to drown out the negative voices from real life.
That’s often the issue, at least for me. It’s easier to submerge myself in someone else’s life and avoid the difficult parts of my own. But in the process, I sacrifice the good stuff as well.
I don’t think it’s a coincedence that depression and anxiety have increased as our options and opporutnities for entertainment have grown. The more we can escape, the more we either bury our difficult emotions or increase them by comparing ourselves to others.
At the hockey game, there was a glass wall between us and the action on the ice. So often, we place some kind of glass wall between us and reality. Looking back at my life, I don’t want to find myself just watching too much. I likely have less days left to live than days already lived, and every day that ratio becomes even larger.
I don’t want to spend the rest of life watching; I want to spend it living.
Breaking Into Peace 