Gradualism in action

I had picked up a penchant for Scrabble a couple years ago, and fed it with Hasbro's computer program for a little while before it fell away. My Treo 650 smartphone, however, suddenly allowed me to play the game in tiny doses at almost any time and place. I found myself whipping it out in all my spare moments -- on the toilet, lying in bed, during the kids' bath, waiting for someone to call me back. Those moments never seemed like a dedicated block of time, but boy did they add up. For a while I was playing two to three games a day, about an hour to an hour and a half of game time, every day.

About a month ago, at the very same moment I decided to work more closely with the UNC SKS, I stopped playing Scrabble. It just stopped seeming like a good idea. I think part of what prompted it was seeing one of my clients playing Solitaire on his computer, and feeling a smug disdain, and suddenly realizing that my Scrabble fixation looked a lot like his, only worse, because at least he had no illusions that he was not utterly wasting his time.

So . . . what happened to all that time. Well, predictably, I found another way to fill in those moments. Hopefully, a better one: I listen to audio books. Again, a miracle of the smartphone: you can carry around dozens of audiobooks in your pocket, so you don't even have to wait until your driving to listen to them. In the last month or two, I have read/listened to:

• The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Freakonomics
• Something Rotten, by Jaspar Fforde
• A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle
• On Writing, by Stephen King

It's not meditating on ultimate reality, but it's a hell of a lot closer to the way I want to live my life than Scrabble.

I write this mostly to toot my horn and celebrate a small victory. Richard Rose wrote that, in the spiritual life, "you must use gradualism, even as gradualism was used on you." He believed that the spiritual path was a "backing away from untruth," constantly getting rid of the things that were less-than-conducive to living for the truth, and replacing them with better things. It's nice to notice that it still works.