Last year, my laptop started to slow down. I’ve found that at about the four-year mark, for whatever reasons, the speed and smoothness of a computer fade. From then on, it’s a showdown between my antsyness to have better, more up-to-date tech and my patience to use what I have to the best of my and its ability.
Rather than succumb right away to spending and materialism that could be excessive, I stubbornly tried to resuscitate and sustain the ol’ machine following tips from online articles. I tried to purge extraneous data from the hard drive and complete regular updates. I did a system restore, totally erasing the computer and starting from scratch with reuploaded hard drive files and a reinstalled operating system. I even downloaded a program whose main purpose was to condense and cleanup the computer and get it humming like new again, only to find that the free trial would only tell me what’s wrong and wouldn’t complete the task of fixing it.
That program frustrated me, but it added a nifty tool to the taskbar on the top of my screen. It would alert me if my laptop’s RAM was near its capacity, and offer to trim the computer’s usage to get the RAM back under control. RAM stands for random access memory, and it’s a facet of computers that more or less (tech junkies can skewer me accordingly) simultaneously runs the various programs and operations that are going at any time.
One fix that many sources suggested was monitoring RAM and adjusting one’s usage to avoid programs that chew up a lot of RAM. That’s precisely what my trial program tried to do by alerting me with a warning about high capacity and offering to get it back down. Other sources disagreed, though. They argued that a computer is designed to complete these computational tasks at high speed and high volume to help its user. The RAM is there to facilitate this, so a computer is functioning well if its user is engaging its RAM capacity with several tasks. At the end of the day, the debate was moot for me -- none of these fixes were helping my computer. And as a teacher at the time, my computer’s inability to run a powerpoint and let me retain my desktop without freezing was the final nail in its coffin. Luckily, I got a good trade-in value and a sales-tax-free transaction through an Oregon company to fix the problem and ease my guilty, anti-materialistic soul.
But the debate about RAM stuck with me. Just because the computer has the capacity to run a certain amount of programs, should I constantly be using it all in order to utilize the full function of the computer? The quandary of multi-tasking is constantly on my mind. In this case, the analogy of RAM seemed so easily applicable to the mindset of a person at prayer.
I pretty much always look forward to going to Mass. I love the immersion in community -- the sign of peace, the cacophony of children and babies, the friendly ushers and ministers. I love the music -- the hum of the organ, the whispy voices of the children’s choir, the old guy two pews back who’s singing way too loud. I love the intentionality -- an hour in which nothing else is expected of me than for me to do Mass.
Yet, a lot of time, I feel like I let the pitch go by without swinging. Before I blink, we’re already seated for the homily. I feel like I blew the chance to make a diligent prayer in the Penitential Rite, like I didn’t key into the readings and Psalm, like I’ll zone out of the homily because I didn’t get a solid basis in listening to the readings.
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| Homer: “I have a very short attention span.” Missionary: “Our point is very simple. You see, when…” Homer: “OH LOOK, A BIRD!” |
But I’m not sure that’s the right way to use my RAM. When sitting at home, even with a big checklist of potential to-do’s, even with social media begging for a fresh scroll, even with the DVR and Netflix queue beckoning, there are times to take a different path. Leave the TV off; set aside my phone; close my laptop. It’s time to grab a book and just read. It’s time to load up Lucy and our stuff and just go for a walk. It’s time to let it be quiet and just play together. There are times when I can let the RAM zero out. Instead of loading up on tasks and execution, I can choose to do just one thing, namely, be present.
I think my challenge with quieting down to pray well becomes clearer through this analogy. I have so much RAM to do so much, to prioritize a list, to do a bunch of things at once, or to do one task after another. And certain things demand some RAM at Mass -- attention to Lucy, awareness of others nearby, etc. I think the challenge in prayer, and especially at Mass, is how to confront my big RAM potential and get it under control to be used well. I either need to acknowledge the capacity I have to do and decide to run zero programs for a bit. Or I need to use that RAM to intentionally run a lean program, one that is just present to the “alerts” and “applications” of presence in that liturgy.
The ideal would be that my capacities can be totally free and available, moved only by the flowing grace of prayer and not tied up by the frantic tasks I conjure and assign. It’s a tall order. I can tear things down and start from scratch when I’m sitting in my family room; for whatever reason, it’s more challenging to redirect the RAM in prayer.
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