Beyond the Screen: How a Simple Morning Routine Restores Our Focus on What Matters

Some mornings do not arrive with a bang but with a whisper. When you are quiet long enough, you can hear it. I tend to call it silence, but that isn’t the truth. The world isn’t silent.

I am sitting at the kitchen table waiting for my coffee to finish percolating. Yes, I still use a percolator. I can hear the aquarium pump working and a few stirrings from the bedroom as my wife begins to wake up. In the distance, a crow announces that he is awake and apparently on duty.

Great. Coffee is finally done.

I put on my shoes, grab a cup, and head to the front porch. The sun is slowly climbing higher in the sky. Shadows are retreating, and the world is coming into focus.

Would you look at that.

At the bottom of the step is a little ant on his merry way, already working, doing whatever it is ants do. He is carrying something back toward the colony, and I suspect it is breakfast.

Do ants eat breakfast?

Whatever he is carrying, it seems important to him. He is in a hurry and pays no attention at all to the old giant sitting on the porch watching his every move.

There is that crow again in the distance, calling out to other crow folks, I suspect.

I am not hearing silence.

I am hearing quiet.

A car passes somewhere along the highway, and I can hear tires moving over the pavement. The aquarium pump still hums behind me. Birds are doing bird things.

The world is not in chaos at the moment.

I turn toward the door and wonder where my phone is.

Oh, yeah. It is on the shelf by the door.

That thing does not make a sound, yet somehow it screams in its silence.

It wants attention.

More specifically, it wants my attention.

That glowing glass rectangle can almost feel predatory in its silence. Pick me up. Look at me. Check this. Read that. Be worried. Be angry. Be excited. Buy something.

Not now.

I do not want it. I need this moment.

Then another thought creeps in.

I had better get it. Someone may need to speak to me or send a text.

No one really talks much anymore. There is rarely a voice on the other side. More often it is an advertisement, some notification, or somebody trying to sell me something.

Stop it.

See what happened?

I am already giving it attention, and I have not even picked it up.

I look back down toward the ants.

The little fellow carrying breakfast has disappeared, apparently making it safely home. Others are moving along the same path while the old giant continues to watch.

The sun is higher now, and the world has come further into view. The ants remain busy, unconcerned with light, shadow, or me. They are simply doing their work.

I suspect they do not call it work.

To them, it is survival.

Those little ants do not care about the giant watching them. I have no real meaning to them. They have a task in front of them, and that task gets their attention.

That is when I begin to wonder if the ants are telling me something.

We spend a great deal of time worrying about survival, but survival is not always standing guard, preparing for battle, or knowing how to fight off an enemy.

Sometimes survival may mean becoming quiet long enough to remember what deserves our attention.

The ant has a giant watching him who means nothing to him.

I have Someone watching me who means everything.

I call Him God.

He watches us move through our days, scurrying from one thing to the next, often giving Him surprisingly little thought. The ants and I are different, of course. I have something they do not have.

A soul.

And if I am truthful, there are plenty of days when I do not give much thought to that soul either.

Yet God does.

He cares about how I feed it, how I care for it, and what I do with the life He has given me.

I am fairly certain that the glowing rectangle on the shelf does not care about my soul.

It wants attention.

That is all.

The ants keep moving toward what they need for survival, and perhaps that is where I need to be moving too, although my survival involves something greater than food carried back to a colony.

Ants do ant things.

People do people things.

But I have to remember that Someone is watching me, and unlike the ant watching the giant above him, I can look back.

So I ask Him, “What do You want from me today?”

The funny thing is, I already know the answer.

I need to love more.

I need to be there for someone who needs me.

I need to help carry a load when someone else cannot carry it alone.

I need to care for my soul and care for my neighbor.

And there it is again.

The glowing triangle comes to mind.

I should probably check it.

No.

Not now.

Its quiet screaming can wait.

Most of what it wants from me is reaction. Be angry about this. Be afraid of that. Get excited about another product. Worry about what someone hundreds or thousands of miles away said this morning.

What I need right now is peace.

I need enough quiet to remember the One who is watching me and what He has already asked me to do.

Care for my soul.

Care for my neighbor.

Do the work in front of me.

And sometimes, perhaps, just sit on the porch and watch little ants remind me how to be.

Maybe today the lesson is simply this:

Sit.

Be quiet.

Listen to the silence that is not really silence.

Let a little ant show you something.

And remember there is Someone greater than myself watching, guiding, and sometimes using something as small as an ant to teach me how to simply be.