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Acedia: The Noonday Devil That Disrupts the Present Moment
It preys upon our inability to sit quietly in our sacred space.
You’re sitting at home alone and your WiFi goes out. You begin to panic, wondering how long it would be out. You try to go online even though the cellular network in your area is sometimes spotty. You realize you can’t take care of this online, so you, gulp, have to call customer service.
You work through the 17 automated menus to try to solve your problem, but after a while, you just hit 0 to talk to an actual human. You’re told you have at least a 10-minute wait. What will you do? You don’t have internet, you cut your cable cord a year ago, and you can’t play a movie because you disconnected your DVD player. You have to sit and wait for 10 minutes.
You wash your dishes while your phone is on speaker. You start a load of laundry. Only six minutes have gone by. It seems like forever. Four more minutes of waiting seems impossible.
Your frustration has a name — acedia. In Treatise on the Practical Life, the 4th-century monk Evagrius Ponticus described this feeling that encompasses boredom, hopelessness, and frenzy all into one. It preys upon our inability to sit quietly in our own sacred space. It feeds on our fear of being alone. It can also keep us feeling stuck.
