We invested in a stationary bike last week, and though I’ve enjoyed using it I’m also stressed out by it. Looking at it in the corner of my living room I feel the same way I felt looking at my first new car in the driveway–like I’d just financially and emotionally committed myself to something that was bound to break.

I’ve winced to see Daughter climbing on it these first few days, spinning the pedals as fast as they’ll go, climbing down with both feet on one pedal. I’ve used my stern voice to tell her to stop. This morning I began to pedal and I heard a scraping noise coming from the flywheel I’d never heard before. It lasted the entire ride. See? Broken already. I knew this would happen. This is why we can’t have nice things.

When Daughter gets up and is enjoying her Eggos on the couch I tell her, “This morning I heard a noise coming from the wheel of the bike.” My tone is somewhere between “I told you so” and “I’m really disappointed in you.”

“Oh yeah,” she says as she hops off the couch and leads me to the bike. Then she looks me in the face and without breaking eye contact reaches down and grabs the cable that connects the flywheel to the monitor, lifts it off the flywheel and rests it against the frame. “It’s the cord hitting the wheel. I heard it last night.”

I’m still disappointed, just not in her.

I have a playlist called “Check Out (2019).” It’s filled with music I read was released this year, music I heard a little bit of and wanted to explore further. It has albums as recent as Luke Lalonde’s “The Perpetual Optimist,” released just last Friday, as well as “This (Is What I Wanted To Tell You),” an album by the folk artist Lambchop that came out back in early March.

Check Out (2019) has 1,428 songs on it. Spotify is helpful enough to interpret that for me as 87 hours and 12 minutes of music. I’m not checking that out.

I keep adding albums to check out, but I keep choosing to not check them out, instead opting for songs I’ve already checked out and know I like. This list turned a pleasure into a chore. I think I’ll delete it.

Personal recommendations are better. Is there something you discovered in 2019 that you love so much you recommend it?

All but one of the books assigned for the second year of my current academic pursuit are available on Kindle, and so I have plunged most uncritically into an experiment to transition as much of my academic reading as possible to e-books. The stack of paperbacks that was my first year reading list is on a shelf in my closet, badly suited for a home library and daunting as commute cargo so that it might be deployed in my office. Going all digital will at least solve that problem.

But will it make it more or less likely that I read the books, and thoroughly? I got through almost all of last year’s reading, even though I typed up notes as I read. Kindle’s desktop and iPad software will display all the highlights and notes I make on my Paperwhite, so that seems like a plus. And there’s just the extraordinary ability to have the entire reading list on hand all the time.

Sometimes the meaningful barriers to working aren’t access, though.

It happens almost once a week that I find myself on a train mere feet away from someone I know, usually from church, and who I will not interact with at all during our 10-20 minutes of riding public transit together. We won’t look at each other, and we certainly won’t speak. I mean, I will look at them, but only long enough to make the “incidental” eye contact that would make it acceptable to smile in recognition and say hello. Then I look away. I don’t know, while I’m looking away are they trying to make incidental eye contact with me?

This feels strange. I fear I’m being rude by not greeting people I know and that they’re going to recount it to someone later, like, “I was on a train with him for eight stops and he didn’t even say hi.” But I follow this self-imposed protocol for fear of being intrusive. We all seem very occupied on public, mostly with our phones but also with books or magazines. We have perfected the inaudible signal that says, “Don’t speak to me.” To break into someone’s personal time during their commute feels uninvited and irritating.

We are a city teeming with people, strangers to one another in the most crowded of spaces, even among friends.

Music subscription? Check.

Audiobook subscription? Check.

News subscription? Check.

T.V. and movie subscription? Check.

Fitness subscription? Check.

Meditation subscription? Check.

Diet subscription? Check.

Subscribing is an easy way to opt in to something entertaining or informative or beneficial. You sign up with a method of payment, and you’re charged monthly. How easy is that?

But the subscription isn’t the entertainment or the information or the health benefit. Choosing the subscription is important, but not as important as choosing over and over again to use it.

I got next year’s reading list for my academic program, and I’m chomping at the bit to get started. But I have a big assignment due for this year first.

Christmas worship needs planning. But first there’s a youth retreat this weekend.

Those summer youth trips aren’t going to organize themselves. And neither is my credit card reconciliation–due in two days–going to assemble itself and turn itself in.

I am never more responsible about advance planning than when I’m facing some urgent deadline.

I watched the first day of impeachment hearings. Like, a lot of it. Like, hours. That didn’t stop me from watching the PBS News Hour reporting on it that night.

It also didn’t stop me from reading the news summary of it in the New York Times. And the Washington Post. And NPR.

Nor from listening, the next day, to analysis of the hearing’s import by The Daily, What’s News, Post Reports, Up First, Today Explained and What Next.

Over the rest of the week I added analysis by the NPR Politics Podcast, the Slate Political Gabfest, and the Editors of the National Review.

My sources were almost all within the box of high reliability and neutral political bias on the ad fontes media bias chart. Where I indulged the less neutral (Slate, The National Review), I did so equally.

And after all that watching first hand followed by reading and hearing reporting and commentary from a variety of reliable sources, somebody is still going to say that I (and people like me) are being duped by “the media.”

Maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s them.

While we’re singing the closing hymn, my pinky finger is subtly tucked between pages 12 and 13 of the hymnal, holding the place where the charge is printed. The charge, in my church, is the penultimate thing the preacher says in the worship service, right before the benediction. The benediction I got. My charge needs work.

I like to use this one that says things like, “support the suffering” and “return no one evil for evil,” but I don’t do it quite right; last Sunday I heard my colleague do it and she said parts of it that I don’t. Hearing that filled me with a sense of professional negligence that I have to remedy.

Fortunately, there’s a service outline in the very front of our glossy purple hymnals, and, sure enough, the full text of that charge is printed right there:

Go out into the world in peace;
have courage;

hold onto what is good;
return no one evil for evil;
support the weak;

help the suffering;
honor all people;

love and serve the Lord,

rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The organist hits the final not on the hymn and I nonchalantly slide the hymnal onto the table in front of me, open to page 13, and Nail. The. Charge. The transition to the benediction puts the final punctuation mark on the service.

“And now may the . . .

. . .

. . .

“How does this go again?”

In focusing on the charge, I lost the benediction. “And now my the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit go with us all today and every day. Amen.” I’ve said it dozens and dozens of times over 15 years of ministry and never forgotten it. Yet today all it took was some concentrated focus on the charge to forget it entirely.

This is how it starts, right?

Much more important than what we think and say, how we think and say it divides us. The polarization we hear so much about is a matter both of substance and attitude.

I am trying to take in commentary and analysis from different points of view, because it is challenging in an important way to hear people express opinions that contradict mine. The really challenging part, though, is choosing expressions of opposing viewpoints that take mine seriously and treat it respectfully. So much of our editorializing relies on tone.

The takeaway from the frustration that results is that 1) I don’t ever want the people I disagree with to feel ridiculed or disparaged when I talk to them; I need to watch my tone. And 2) there is limited value in seeking out commentary that makes me feel ridiculed or disparaged. If the tone upsets me, I can switch it off.

When his kids went off to college, my friend from California moved to upstate New York and bought an Inn. I know him from rec. league softball and high school water polo, and now he’s cooking breakfast every day for bed and breakfast patrons, employing a staff of locals, and throwing shade at anyone who leaves a bad tripadvisor review. All signs point to him enjoying himself immensely.

What’s something you can only imagine yourself doing? Maybe it won’t always be in your imagination.