The Art of Hanging Out by Jessamyn Rains

Before there were smartphones, people used to hang out.

We would drive, talking. We would go to people’s houses and sit around, talking. Then we would go out for coffee and talk some more.

Life shifted: There was work plus technology. Email, cell phones, social media, and smartphones. Siri and Alexa.

Somewhere along the way, I exchanged my Gen X slacker work ethic for the so-called Protestant one. I bought button-down shirts. I learned that the entire universe depends on to-do lists and that if I fail to make a detailed, properly prioritized list and accomplish approximately 75% of the things on it, the universe will devolve into its constituent parts.

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Once upon a time, in the throes of my Protestant Work Ethic years, I was single and lonely. I got set up on dates and went to restaurants with strangers. More often than not, the person sitting on the other side of the bread basket was not Mr. Right, and I was not Ms. Right, and I knew that if I tried to lie to myself about this, there would be lots of existential despair, and I would be better off wandering lonely as a cloud around the sad part of town. These were evenings of fake smiling and stilted conversation and feigned interest — though not too much interest — and ill-fated attempts at “let’s be friends” conversations in parking lots.

Eventually, I got married, and I quickly learned that married people can be lonely too. When you’re lonely and married, you go out with couples. It’s a lot like dating; you’re sizing each other up over the bread basket.

And if you’re like me, you realize you are Trying Too Hard and you don’t know how to stop. The Protestant work ethic has crept into your evening and the whole thing has taken on the tone of a job interview and your friendliness is fake not because you don’t want to be there but because you can’t let anyone know that you are a Sad, Lonely Person.

There is a different quality of loneliness when you are an isolated stay-at-home mom and you don’t have mom friends because of Mommy Wars and because you started having kids when you were old enough to be a grandmother. 

You get together with some women maybe once every eighteen months if you’re lucky and you put some makeup on and your one unstained t-shirt and you go out and everything is lonely and awkward and stilted and you are clearly an outsider and still Trying Too Hard.

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When I was a teenager, I went on a few mission trips. Before one of these trips, the leader came to me and said, “God wants to hang out with you.”

So I tried to hang out with God.

It’s harder than it sounds.

I was beset by complicated teenage emotions. Plus a chronic struggle with depression in a time and place when the prevailing theory seemed to be that God preferred happy people. I tried hard to feel spiritual feelings, but I didn’t, and the things I did feel seemed to disqualify me.

But at the end of the outreach—somehow, after all my trying and struggling—I had my breakthrough.

I began to understand that I could be myself with God. That I could talk to Him. That He really did see me , that the weirdness and quirkiness and psychological baggage and poor fashion sense I struggled with were not the insurmountable problems I thought they were. I had moments where I felt a new kind of lightness ,  a lightness that comes from being understood and accepted exactly as you are, and so you no longer have to Try Too Hard.

This is when you really start hanging out.

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Sometimes my interior life gets cluttered, and if I get quiet, all I hear is the sound of my inner monologue and everything I have read and heard and thought about, and felt. Sometimes I am haunted and tormented, afraid of the quiet. But even under the clutter, in spite of the fear — He’s there.

I have determined that if I am Trying Too Hard with God, I am not really praying. I am completing a religious exercise. It may not be totally inefficacious, or unmeritorious, but I can tell that it’s stiff and stilted and forced when it doesn’t need to be.

The best, most efficacious prayers come from a heart at rest in Him. And if you can’t be at rest, you can start by being honest.

The other day, my daughter followed up our mealtime prayer with one of her own: “Dear Jesus, baby [brother] was being bad. Amen.”

I told her, “I don’t think you need to tattle on your brother to God.”

My husband challenged me: “Shouldn’t she tell Him anything that’s on her mind?”

Pour out your hearts to Him…God is a refuge for us.

~

These days, I hang out with my kids. We sit on the couch. We look at books. We have conversations about tractors and garbage trucks and dinosaurs and unicorns and where babies come from. We talk through every thought that passes through their little heads. We sing their favorite songs (though sometime around June 15th I will place a moratorium on “Angels We Have Heard on High”).

My work ethic still gets in the way, and when I am overwhelmed, I can be aloof. Impatient. There are lots of things to do when you’re a mommy to little people, especially if you’re naturally disorganized and riddled with ADHD. More than ever, it feels like the universe is going to break down into its constituent parts if you don’t successfully complete the items on your to-do list.

But then there are times when I manage to transcend the to-do list. I soar above those prioritized items, and I begin to perceive a different set of priorities: Love, understanding, relating, listening, expressing, and learning. Time isn’t something you scrimp and crunch, nor is it something you waste. It is something precious that you spend on someone you love.

When you're hanging out, time is no longer measured in hours or minutes, but in stirrings of the heart and mind. 

Jessamyn Rains is a mother to four small children who writes and makes music. Her writing has appeared in Ancient Paths, Bez & Co, Soul-Lit, Amethyst Review, Liquid Imagination, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, Kosmeo Magazine, and Agape Review.