These are the dog days, the fog days, the automaton days, days of sleepy restlessness when the vice of shallowness snuffs out the bit of light I normally cast over the entrance of my tent. Days when I forget who I am, and forget to be who I am. I forget that what was realized was right, and go on my way unrealized. Here, shallowness passes for substance. The glib for the ingenious. My "being" gives way to role and I become the mere total of my functions.

These are the days of acedia…what the monks call the noon-day demon. The demon being identified not by simple laziness but by a sluggishness and oppressiveness of soul. Identified not so much by a lack of caring–although on a particular level it is certainly this–but by an inordinate degree of caring about the cosmetic and the petty. The noon-day demon diverts energies away from realization to undifferentiated restlessness. And I, yielding, fall in and inhabit these days, get stuck in them…as I believe we all do from time to time.

But then, with respect to acedia we might just as well be speaking of our culture. Caught as we are in a post-modern depression. Not recognizing that it comes from wearing ourselves out in busyness, and in exhausting ourselves in current techniques for comfort and security and recreation. Not realizing our communal indifference is symptomatic of a lack of spiritual depth.

And so by cultural default, we are spiritual skimmers, enamoured by spirituality but not spiritual effort.  And we, in a kind of perennial Enlightenment hangover, remain beguiled by "critical distance" and rationality, which serves us as a refuge from the mystery of faith, and the pain (and joy) of true consciousness. Not that we don’t require apt refuge from real pain, it’s just that acedia is a false harbour and ends in emotional and spiritual death. In the grip of acedia we keep distant all things that would awaken us or require us to look into ourselves, examine our habits, and renew our disciplines.

We’ve had cataclysmic moments of collective awakening. Tragic as they were, arresting as they were, we were soon back busy, restless and comfortably numb, our collective spiritual torpor cemented and protected by 24 hour news channels.

But we are, of course, our culture. I am, my culture. And unless the knee cap of my mind meets the sharp right angle of a metal door jam, and the hot wire inside flickers to life, I will continue dissipating across some cracked-dry inner landscape. My thoughts like dusty indolent pigweed, tumbling, without resolution, only adding to the common malaise.

Those of us snared by acedia must find ways to extract ourselves, pass go, collect 200, and find ourselves fit for another round. Wether it is through a Dantean heartfelt rush of repentance, or a monastic waiting and watching, or through contemplative reading, or an outside event or encounter, or perhaps an epiphany, however the break-out is achieved, the break-out is imperative for personal and communal flourishing.

Things get taken. Things get lost. Things are never owned. We only get to use them for a while. In this life, renting, is a closer approximation of our relationship with things. Wether it’s a capacity, an opportunity, or an object, like my son’s first car, stolen during the night…things get taken, wear out, get lost.

We are fooled into believing in the permanence of ownership by the laws we write and the language we use. Yet truly, we are only tenants, lessees, boarders…never proprietors…never outright owners. It is, I suppose, possible to use the language of ownership as long as we realize it rests on a rolling sea of temporality. But in practice, we have bought into ownership as something fixed. We live in the unreality of "private property," private possessions. And the degree to which we give possession credence is the degree to which we are ourselves possessed. Owned by what we think we own.

Not that we shouldn’t mourn, grieve, get angry, over loss. To do otherwise would be robotic. It is what we end up doing with that grief or anger that informs our life. A position of ownership will have us obsessing over security and adding to our bondage.

You may recall learning that early residents of the land never lived by any concept of ownership. Ownership was quite literally a foreign concept. They lived, for the most part, as stewards. A concept our western sensibility has skewed irretrievably. Even, I suppose, in disputes of hunting territory, (however this was framed because territory was an unknown notion) "territory" was seen as a gift, not a right.

Perhaps it’s our material and mechanistic outlook that has contributed to all our ideas of possession. If our universe is all blind happenstance there is no-thing to be thankful to. Whether this is a good enough reason to believe in transcendence is questionable. But to be caught being profoundly thankful, (a ubiquitous human experience) with no one to thank, is stultifying and robs us of a certain pliability. Thankfulness, after all, keeps us from hardening, and is a prime way to hang on to things loosely.

And this hanging on loosely, what the monastics call detachment, is the way we must walk through our life if we are to have a chance at flourishing. That’s because the closer we live to what’s true about our world, the freer we are. The more we live in obligation to creation, the more we grow, the more we create.

So my son, after that very crappy feeling goes away, here’s to d’Artagnan II. May she run long, but never own you.