Temporary Retirement and a Record Player

Choosing less, and the slow work of being present.

A while back, in the season after I stepped away from YouVersion, I bought a record player.

I was in my temporary retirement phase, as I called it then, though Robin was kind enough not to laugh out loud when I said it. Months with no deadlines, no highly contested calendars, and no title. Time to be quiet, to pay attention, to play more tennis, and to figure out what the next chapter needed to be. The silent retreat I wrote about was part of that season. So was, it turns out, a record player. I did not understand at the time that they were the same impulse. I am beginning to now.

It started simple. I wanted something cheap, just to try it, to see if the thing I was reaching for was even real. But the moment I jumped in, I felt the old pull. Within a day, I was deep in beautiful, expensive turntables, vintage speakers, midcentury furniture to set it all on. The simple idea had quietly become a project, a thing to optimize, something to get exactly right. And I had to laugh at myself, because this is the very instinct I am trying to unlearn. The reach for more, dressed up as the reach for better.

So I stopped. I simplified. I found a really nice setup on Facebook Marketplace, good enough to be a joy and modest enough to keep me honest. I was not trying to build the perfect listening room. I was trying to sit down with my wife and hear one album.

Then I went looking for records.

The first store I walked into only took cash. I do not carry cash. I do not really like cash. I tap a phone and move on with my day, and I could not tell you the last time I paid with a bill. So there I stood, in a record shop, albums in my hands, with no way to pay for them. I had to set them on the counter, walk a couple of blocks to an ATM, and walk back. A small thing. A few minutes. But I felt the friction of it in my body, the low hum of irritation at a world that would not just let me tap and go.

And somewhere on that walk it struck me how honest the whole moment was. Here I was, reaching for something slower and more analog and less connected, and the very first step of it annoyed me. My soul yearns for that unhurried world. And so much of me is still planted firmly in the connected, frictionless, digital one. Both of those are true. The walk to the ATM was simply where I felt the seam between them.

There is a cost to a record, and the cost just might be the point. One album runs thirty dollars, and a good box set can run a hundred and fifty or more. You stand there with your hands in the bins and you feel the weight of the choice, because you are not choosing from everything. You are choosing one thing, and the one thing you carry to the counter is the one thing you will live with. Compare that to what I usually do, which is summon any album ever recorded, for about twenty dollars a month, and discard it thirty seconds later for the next one. The infinite catalog is a genuine marvel. I spent nineteen years helping build technology to put Scripture into the hands of people everywhere, and I believe in what a digital tool can do. But nothing in that catalog costs me anything, and I have started to notice what that does to me. I skip. I hunt. I half-listen to a hundred things and sit with none of them. The abundance that promised me everything has quietly trained me to be present to almost nothing.

I keep coming back to something from the monastery. What surprised me in those three days of silence was that the most formative practices were not the ones that added something. They were the ones that took something away. Silence. Solitude. Slowing down. Letting go of constant input. I wrote then about sculpting, how the artist does not create beauty by piling on more material but by removing what does not belong. The record player is that same lesson, except now it is sitting in my living room.

Because here is what actually happens. Robin and I get to the end of a long week. A lot of noise, a lot of motion, the kind of week where the days blur and you cannot quite recall Wednesday. We sit down, feet up, and instead of asking an algorithm to read our mood and serve us something, we choose. I walk to the credenza, pull one album, slide it from the sleeve, and set the needle down. There is a scratch and a hum before the first note, that small imperfection that tells you something physical is happening in the room. And then we are simply there. For the length of one side, there is nothing to skip to, nothing better only one tap away. The choice has been made, and the making of it sets us free to be present.

That is the part I am trying to learn to cherish. Richard Rohr has helped me see how trained I am to want quick resolution, to sort the world into tidy binaries. Efficient or wasted. More or less. The gift of the record is that it refuses the binary. It is less music and more presence. A smaller library and a larger evening. A tension I am learning not to resolve but to enjoy.

And I want to be honest about where this leaves me, because it is not anywhere tidy. I have not reconciled it. There is a part of me that loves the album, the analogness, the slowness, the deliberate disconnection of setting a needle down and staying for one side. And there is a part of me that still deeply values the access and the discovery.

Just this week a new Death Cab for Cutie record dropped, I Built You a Tower. Death Cab has been a favorite of mine for a few decades, and I had been waiting on this one. I put it on and lived in it across the day, and somewhere in there the algorithm lifted up a band I had never heard, Manchester Orchestra, a live album of theirs recorded in a London chapel. I have not stopped playing it since. I would not have found it on my own, not easily, not like that. The infinite catalog did not just hand me access. It handed me a personalized discovery I now love. That is a real gift, and I am not going to pretend it is not.

So I am not choosing one and renouncing the other. I am learning to hold both. To let the record player teach me presence without pretending the rest is not also a gift. The slow life I am after is not a rejection of the connected one. It is the harder work of being present inside a connected world that will not slow down on its own. The challenge of being intentional with the algorithm, intentional with the analog. Not running on autopilot.

The needle still scratches before the first note. Robin is still beside me on our chairs. And some nights, that one bounded, costly, beautiful choice is enough to remind me what I am actually after. Not less music. More presence.

Until next time,

Terry