Re-settle Your American Kids by
Choosing Restraint
I have spent much of my life in mild mockery of the Amish and their "backward" ways.
I am repenting those views.
The Amish can teach me and the rest of our country the power of RESTRAINT.
To choose to abstain, when also capable of choosing the opposite, is the ultimate barometer of true power and wisdom.
“There are, one may as well say, only two Amish institutions: the family and the community. And these institutions fulfill directly, humanly, simply, and quietly nearly all the functions that we have delegated to our obtrusive, inhuman, indifferent, clumsy, expensive institutions. Family and community serve as insurance, welfare, social security, public safety. Indeed, they serve as, and replace, government. The simple living together of relatives and neighbors makes unnecessary to them our obsession with ‘security.’”
“The Amish do not have the abandoned children, cast-off old people, criminals, indigents, and vagrants whom we have ‘freed from drudgery.’”
This entire series spent exploring Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, has been a declaration that powerful, wise parenting and teaching necessarily lie on the other side of restraint.
The modern narrative of less labor, but more "work" and more stuff is not proving a recipe for healthy, human living. It is eroding family, true community, and has become a pursuit past happiness. The Amish may not have all the answers, but they understand one key pathway, the path back. Back to work in the midst of life, back to people, back to a known place.
To achieve the settled life we all desire for our children, we too must trod this path of restraint.
This week I challenge you to do one of two things:
If you haven't yet read, The Unsettling of America, do so. If you have, try another collection of essays or one of my personal favorites, Life is a Miracle.
To create the time to do so, you may need to restrain yourself from the use of another type of media. Begin your own dialogue with these people who are probably quite "other" than you and expand your diversity of knowledge, history, and perspective.
You may just be changed by the end of it. I know I have been.
The path to a more settled life is labeled with one word: restraint.
Our healthier, children, families, and communities are waiting for us to show the courage to lead them in it.
For more from The Unsettling of America,
visit here and go to the "Work & Restraint" topic tab