Taking Time To Enjoy Life Is A Necessity
There is a woman with glorious white hair who walks through my neighborhood every day. She keeps her own time, following no particular schedule.
If I am out in the first light of morning, I see her. In the afternoon, she is there, too. And at twilight I often catch her rounding the corner, her strong legs grabbing the hill like a young lioness.
She is fit, of course, but her physical condition seems to be more of a happy by-product of her walking, rather than the reason behind it.
She always smiles and nods her head but never says a word. I know nothing about her, not her name, or where she lives, or what she does when she is not walking. I don’t need to know more. This is her time, a sliver of sanctuary. In her walks, she is deliberately choosing to make something ordinary sacred.
A man I know goes to the same coffee shop at the same early hour every morning to read the newspaper.
He spreads the pages out like a treasure map, then slowly, deliberately reads every word.
While the waitress sets up for the day’s rush of customers, he smiles over the comics, considers the news, watches the stock market. He breathes in the smell of coffee brewing and life coming awake. Before the first onslaught of java junkies arrive, he is gone. He, too, is making room for something extraordinary in the midst of everyday life.
Quiet time, sacred space, sanctuary. Between all the duties of life, the ones we choose and the ones that choose us, there seems to be a lot less time for actually living. Life, like the proverbial small town, is passed through so quickly we can blink and miss it entirely.
We might even get to the end of our lives before we realize we’re actually living someone else’s version of it. Unless, like the walker and the reader, we slow down the trip.
Savoring the present and making sacred the ordinary is more about surrender than retreat. To do it doesn’t require chanting, juice fasts or high colonics. It doesn’t require a guru or a set of 30 how-to cassettes.
Everyday joy can be found in a doughnut shop, serenity in tying flies. The most ordinary activities, when done deliberately and with attention to detail can become meaningful.
Sharing the morning toast with the family dog, taking a hot shower on a cold morning or driving under the influence of good manners all provide the opportunity to appreciate life at precisely the moment we are living it.
The trick is in paying attention.
Kids do it all the time. They know exactly where the sidewalk cracks to let in a flower and how many legs a beetle runs on. Without a license to drive, they see what the freeway passes by.
In the old days, before people had cell phones and daytimers and personal trainers, they recharged their kid selves with hobbies, things they did in that quaint period formerly known as leisure time.
Today, moving faster than the speed of life, we might list sleeping as a favorite spare time activity. And while a good night’s sleep can be one of life’s greatest mercies, we have to be unconscious to really enjoy it.
The sense of life moving too fast is not new.
The horse gave way to the car gave way to the jet gave way to the rocket. And being human, it’s probably part of our DNA to feel that no matter how much time we’re allotted it will never be quite enough.
Still, making the most of the time we have seems to hinge on deliberately decreasing the speed at which we live it.
The walker and the reader know this.
Just a few minutes a day, every day, to stop and really smell the coffee, taste the air, hear the laughter, touch the ground and see the person we are becoming before the moment of now becomes another yesterday.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Corkery Spencer The Spokesman-Review