The Thinness That Accumulates

I’ll set the stage for you: It’s 6:15pm in the kitchen. The gang is hungry. “What’s for dinner?!” has been asked by approximately 17 people who keep circling in and out of the kitchen (Reader, there are only five of us. But they asked a lot!) I was about to put frozen Texas Toast in the oven (no offense to my Texas family lineage…it’s a perfectly fine product, I promise!), even though the garlic, the olive oil, the half a baguette were all right there. I had time. I had everything I needed. And I was reaching for the freezer anyway.

I made the real garlic bread. It took eight minutes.

I’ve been noticing lately how many of these tiny forks appear in a single day and, of course, they’re about something far more important than how you prepare your garlic bread. I see these forks in the decision to send the text instead of picking up the phone. To read a few pages of the actual book versus spend twenty minutes scrolling. In letting my kids read the overly-simplistic book with bathroom humor vs. pointing them towards a classic.

The substitute is, almost always, fine. It isn’t bad but it is thinner and across a week, across a year, across a life, this thinness accumulates.

Dr. Danielle Ofri, in a recent New York Times essay, names this thinness — and it’s cost — more precisely. She is writing about medicine and, specifically, about the tremendous distance between the patient an algorithm is analyzing and the patient sitting right in front of her. Her discernment as a doctor is, in a way, the same as my discernment — and maybe yours, too — in the kitchen: Which is the real thing and which is the close substitute? And do I want the real or the substitute to be taking the lead in forming the contours of my life?

I don’t have a tidy answer for any of this but I keep circling back to something that has to do with slowing down, making space for real things to reveal themselves, and being willing to let close substitutes (however tempting they may be) fall away. Such thinking inevitably takes me back to one of my favorite questions: How should we then live?

What do you think? Where are you reaching for the substitute, and where are you finding yourself, sometimes against the tide, choosing the real thing? We read every response you send our way so consider this a genuine invitation to share. It’s a privilege!