Sunlight and Spearmint

an antidote to the daily soul-suck of Modernity

It’s officially summer and you can see the heat. It’s shimmering in loose, hazy waves over the blacktop and on my counter, I’m brewing the year’s first spearmint tea, clipped straight from my garden: two bottles of liquid sunlight.

It’s one of those days that feels decidedly thick—lusty and real. Days like this are good enough to touch, good enough to smell, good enough to drink.

This morning, a friend and I took our kids to the park, and, despite the relentless heat, they played outside until their hair was damp and their cheeks were sunkissed-red. It was the kind of day only children seem to really experience—and only when they’re allowed to.

It’s the opposite of the poisonous web of pixels and bytes we’ve all grown so unfortunately familiar with. It felt like…an antidote.

“Touch the grass,” has become a snarky one-liner thrown around to mock the terminally-online, but there’s actual magic in it. When you’re touching the grass—i.e. doing something tangible that requires effort and exposes you to a certain amount of challenge or friction—not only do you forget about the technoworld, but you actually feel good about yourself. You feel alive. You feel in touch. You feel like a real person and not some unwitting cog in an algorithmic machine.

This is what Andy Crouch refers to in his book, The Life We’re Looking For, as “flow.” And flow, I’m beginning to think, is the cure to the mind-screw of Modernity.

Another article I read some time ago called it—in beautiful romantic spirit—“a Jane Austen life.” In this piece, Jennie writes about her experience with this lost lifestyle:

“My sister and I walked two hours together every day. (This was inspired by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the great Russian composer, who insisted on such a routine, even in the depth of a Russian winter. It was very cold and snowy in the northern Pennsylvanian town we’d just moved to, and my sister and I liked to think we were just as tough as Tchaikovsky!)

When we were home, I played the piano and practiced my arias and art songs. It was something I needed to do, as I was preparing to enroll as a music major at university, but back then I really just sang for the joy of it. And I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote, a historical novel as well as an operetta that I notated very badly on a free online notation site.”

This experience, though, this flow—the sense of raw existence, charmed by the ruggedness of life—is so elusive in the modern era for the simple reason that everything (and I mean everything) is working against it.

Think about it. If you’re like the average 21^st century first-worlder, you live in a cookie-cutter house (if you’re lucky; an apartment if you aren’t) in a bleakly-arranged neighborhood where most of the trees have been cut down to make room for more cookie-cutter houses, in a city or subdivision congested with stroads and strip malls, in a country run by bureaucrats who hate you. I mean, all things considered, it’s no surprise, really, that, at the end of the day, you’re tempted to just throw some sweet, cheap dopamine at your hollow sense of disillusionment. Just to dull the pain. Who wouldn’t be?

But we all know it doesn’t last. In fact, it diminishes you even more because each time you leave The Feed, your craving for flow remains—if not intensifies. However, flow is something you have to work at, something you have to strive for. It’s something you’ve got to pursue with relentless grit in the face of a society plagued by total apathy. It’s not something you can simply swipe for in the digital casino. But that’s why it’s so powerful.

That’s why it’s the antidote.

The only way to climb out of a deep, slick pit is to introduce some friction—something to give yourself purchase against the black walls of the dungeon. It grinds against everything in the psyche of a demoralized people, but survival is a choice. We must make our own way forward, even when no light shines on our path.

The tea on my counter represents the world outside the machine: a sunlit place where it’s quiet and things are slow—where, if I’m willing to put up with a small amount of friction, or, as Huxley writes in Brave New World, “that interval of time between desire and its consummation,” I can find peace and fulfillment—always.

So, touch the grass. Experience challenge. Experience slowness and silence and boredom. Don’t just throw dopamine at it, because the instant you do that, your chance to connect with flow, or, I suppose we might also say muse, is gone. Sucked down the endless spiral of the doomscroll.

Look for ways each day to counter the siren song of Modernity promising a frictionless life: a life that, while filled with convenience and instant gratification, is mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually suffocating. Get off the internet and drive to your library, pick up a book; go for a walk on your lunch break, or in the morning before you leave for work; write some prose or make some music; clip some fresh tea leaves from your garden and bottle the sun. I promise it will make you feel alive, and when you feel alive, there’s hope.