I’m cooking up some oatmeal on the stove, which I plan to eat in a few minutes, sprinkled with walnuts and brown sugar. It’s the only tolerable way I’ve discovered thus far, to eat healthy quantities of walnuts.
Outside it is gray and dreary; a few white patches of snow here and there but nothing especially picturesque. As I sit at my desk and look out the window, I can see all my neighbors’ garbage cans and blue recycling bins awaiting their Tuesday morning pickup, further blights on the landscape, but encouraging, healthy signs of people taking care of their homes. The ones to worry about, I suppose, are the ones who never perform this little ritual.
What does this have to do with The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women's Work? Kathleen Norris’ book taught me a new word: acedia, also known as “the noonday demon”, sloth, spiritual torpor, apathy or ennui. (I wonder about the acedia of people who don't recycle.) Norris wonders if the “frantic boredom and enervating depression that constitute an epidemic in modern life are not merely the ancient demon of acedia in contemporary dress.”
She’s not the first one to have wondered this. All sorts of spiritual writers, liberal and conservative, domestic and foreign, have wondered the same thing, but what I like about Norris is that instead of leaping directly to divine union with God and the universe in order to vanquish acedia, she charts a path through the rituals and routines of the everyday—through hygiene and housework, through caring for oneself and caring for others, through liturgy and prayer, recognizing the vanquishing power of all the little things we do on a daily basis.
Norris writes:
Our culture’s ideal self, especially the accomplished, professional self, rises above necessity, the humble, everday, ordinary task that are best left to unskilled labor. The comfortable lies we tell ourselves regarding these “little things”—that they don’t matter, and that daily personal and household chores are of no significance to us spiritually—are exposed as falsehoods when we consider that reluctance to care for the body is one of the first symptoms of extreme melancholia. At its Greek root the word acedia means “lack of care”.
I was slow to recognize that combating sloth, being willing to care for oneself and others on a daily basis, is no small part of what constitutes basic human sanity, a faith in the everyday.
Has this sort of sloth ever assailed you? How did you combat it? Tomorrow I'll delve a bit into my history, because, looking back, I know in my mid-to-late twenties I was prone to bouts of acedia. I'd like to explore the hows, and whys, and what I did about it then, as compared to what I would do about it now.
As for this dreary morning, here is what the rest of the day holds: I will clean and straighten the bathroom & bedrooms, wash the dishes, go to town to buy the broccoli for tonight's pasta and to return the library books. I will decorate the living room for Christmas, feed my husband and child, go to the Y at 5:30, and then we will all go over to Grandpa's house to visit and make sure his computer is running safely. I will come home, put a child to bed (with all that entails!), watch Judging Amy, (if it's on) and write one Christmas card letter.
No, no laundry; no liturgy. That's tomorrow
11:20:18 AM 
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