Reset

We are four days into Great Lent 2026. Or, a tenth of the way through the 40 days. The 40 official days of Lent take us to the Friday before Lazarus Saturday - the week before Easter! Passion Week, which is a strict fast, is not counted in the 40 days. 

Last night, my daughters and I bunkered down on the couch in the media room. That's right, the study I imagined as a room of my own was rebranded The Media Room when I folded up the spare bed and resurrected the big screen desktop computer. I also did a hard declutter of the space. Of course, then the kids flooded in, threw some blankets on the futon, dragged in a side table to bring the large screen computer closer to the couch, and thus the media room was born. Fair enough, we don't have a TV.

But I digress. We sank into the futon / couch in this newly minted room as night fell and late summer mists swirled through the valleys here, bringing relief to the parched earth. My eldest requested to watch "DPS" -  Dead Poets Society - the 1989 coming-of-age drama set in the late 1950s. She is quite fascinated by the characters, the bright-eyed poetry buffs, the academic air, but also, I think, of the slow naturalistic cinema. 

We recently watched a popular contemporary teen romance drama set in some Massachusetts beach town and everything from the camera framing to the pretty and carefully curated 'diverse cast' made the texture of the show indistinguishable from commercials that interrupted it. The same pretty people. The same glossy magazine interiors. The same flat, bright colours, solar flares and lighting. There were moments when commercials and the TV series were seamless and we would chuckle as the realisation dawned on us, that this family bouncing around in an ad, wasn't a continuation of the show. 

Vincent van Gogh The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884 

So we revelled in the scenery and drama of "DPS" for about an hour between putting dinner plates into the dishwasher and prayer time. Halfway through Peter Weir's iconic film I told the girls it was time for our evening prayers. My youngest daughter sprang off the couch to rush to our prayer corner and help light the candles. I thought she would be the least invested in our lengthened lenten prayers because she can't participate in reading yet. But as I listened, I could hear her murmuring the words to Saint Ephraim's prayer, learning it by rote. 

I suppose that is the special part of Great Lent - it's the way we try to consciously cultivate peace and bring Christ to the centre of our worlds - again. We slip in our ways - forget to turn off our entertainment -and our focus is pulled away from this Centre. Lent is that time to tackle the things that pull our attention away from God. Worldliness, vanity, addictions, distractions, laziness... For me, like many, it's the ubiquitous phone in hand - with its millions of notifications, conversations, threads of thoughts, possibilities. At some point we stopped having dreams, ideas, and moments, and started scrolling through social media and short form videos.

I deleted superfluous chat apps, logged out of the social media accounts - admittedly - not the business one - and I waited to feel different.

 It was instant. 

I kept reaching for the phone but there was nothing to see.

I read most of a book in one day. I started exercising again because I had removed excuses and freed up time. There was some exciting news and I wanted to hop online to share it, but I didn't. And of course, my life didn't get worse because I couldn't share the news with the online world. 

There are plans to share with my extended family and of course, that means I have to pick up the phone and call them instead of sending a message to the group chat. Remember when we used to have real conversations? I barely do.

I am trying to be comfortable in the analogue greyness of time, or maybe the fullness of slow time. I would rather live in that than mistake commercials as entertainment, or scrolling as thoughts and ideas.

 That's my first battle. And I guess, it's wrapped in that is vanity, addiction - all of it.