Acedia.  An ancient word used by desert monks to explain destructive pulls away from their monotonous lives.  These internal pulls and pushes, voices if you will, told them that their lives of work, prayer, and introspection were meaningless. 

Acedia, slothdom, mental laziness, is the primary struggle of my life.  It has been given a name for the first time, thanks to author Kathleen Norris in her brilliant book “Acedia and Me.”  She has revived the use of the word because of it devastating effect on our world today.  It is not a danger to monks, alone; it is a detriment to anyone whose work is viewed as having little practicality but also requires a great deal of concentration to perform.

My Acedia tells me that being a stay-at-home mother is boring, meaningless work and that my mental energy could be better spent gaining “real” employment and bringing in a fat paycheck.  It whispers cunningly, “maybe you would be more fulfilled outside the home?”  Acedia is my constant nagging that maybe society is correct, and my work isn’t of much value.  Maybe my actions do not help anyone afterall.  Maybe my sons will turn out to be absolute assholes anyway, regardless of what I do. 

As soon as I accept these “lies” as truth in my life, I begin to slide into slothdom.  It happens something like this for me:

• I stop cleaning the house and just let things build up because it will just get dirty again.  I do not see value in the monotony.

• I stop playing with and reading to my boys, because it is boring and I’ll just have to do it again tomorrow.  Instead, I lounge on the couch reading People magazine (the least intellectual material I can find) while they play with each other or alone.

• I “space off” in my own world rather than being “in the moment” with family or friends.  In fact, I may even stop answering the phone and talking to people for a while, because I can’t rouse myself to give a damn.

• I stop listening to the troubles of the world, because I can’t do anything to change things. Besides, it depresses me, and I deserve to be happy.

• I stop taking time for hikes in the woods, prayer, and contemplation or anything else that fills me back up again.

• I spend countless hours surfing Open Salon for the most interesting topics and the most intriguing material to comment on. And then, I let the addiction of debate and drama swell into a full frenzy.

At this point, my acedia is my master.  I am a slave to the sloth and have little incentive to change anything.  As the late playwright Wendi Wasserstein puts it, “When you achieve true slothdom you have no desire for the world to change.  True sloths are not revolutionaries (but) the lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo.”

And the status quo of our society glorifies folks who do yoga at dawn before dropping their kids off at daycare before a full day of work while frantically working their blackberrys while commuting to their multitasking jobs who have time to correspond to their 400 friends on facebook and comment on the posts of 50 friends on OS before dropping their kids off at the extracurricular activities after which they will make a home cooked meal for their families and read the required 15 minutes of reading to their children before bed only then to have a romantic candle lit evening with their spouse before attaining the required 8 hours of sleep at night.

But where is the time for passion in life?  What time is left for quiet contemplation? What energy is left for making a positive change in the world? In themselves?  The only result is for one’s spirit to reach a permanent state of slothdom. 

It is time for me to pick myself up, dust myself off, and give a shit.