A woman stands at a busy crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. Next to her stands a man, with a Rottweiler on a leash. Afraid of dogs, the woman's unease noticeably rises.
"Excuse me," she says to the man. "I need to tell you that I am not comfortable around dogs. So I need to know, does your dog bite?"
"No ma'am," he answers.
The woman relaxes.
But before the light turns, the dog reaches out and nips at her purse and arm.
"Hey," she shouts, "What's the story? You told me that your dog doesn't bite!"
"He doesn't," the man, replies. "But this isn't my dog."
We see what we need to see.
I understand.
There is something about our requirement for security or assurance. Because we all have ideas about the way life should be. And if we don't have assurance, there is someone (or some ideology or theology or infomercial) who will tell us what we want to hear, or how to live in order to find it.
Just recently I heard someone say, "I would like to do my life over again. And this time, I'm going to do it right."
Wow.
Good luck with that.
Here's my problem.
We are so focused on how we want life to be, we miss the life we have. Now.
I read a statement made in the Irish Times by a Connemara man after he was arrested for a car accident. "There were plenty of onlookers, but no witnesses."
Hmmm.
Like Sgt. Schultz on Hogan's Heros, "I seeeee noooothing."
Or like tourists who religiously follow the advice of travel journals, and miss the sacred places.
In other words, we don't want to live life.
This life.
We want the correct way to live life.
Which we assume is a life other than the one we have today.
Josh Waitzkin (his life, Searching for Bobby Fisher) tells a story about a day in New York City, where he watched an accident and saw a woman fatally wounded. A woman, forgetting the one-way direction of the traffic, steps off the sidewalk onto Broadway and is almost struck by a racing delivery cyclist. Fuming, she stands in the street, shaking her fist and screaming at the hurried cyclist. While lost in her outrage, she is not paying attention. A speeding taxi rounds the corner to horrifying consequences. What daunted Waitzkin, is the way the woman's loss of her focus cost her dearly.
By keeping her energy on the past (if only, the unfairness, the indignation)
and the future (need to get even, resolution, when), instead of the present, she could not see the taxi, and the consequences were tragic.
(Paraphrased from The Art of Learning)
We may not have the same consequences, but anytime we live in the past, or the future, we find more and more ways to remove ourselves from life.
This life.
Oddly enough, it is even more pronounced when things are discombobulated. I see my 401K go belly-up, I see my work affected, I see the general sense of anxiety, and I become even more controlling, all too eager to make something happen, or to arrive at some happy ending, or to set things right. And I stand in the street screaming at the "cyclist."
And I lose sight of the moment.
This moment.
Which is, in fact, the only moment I have.
We expect to see life or God in a certain way. So, like the woman at the street corner, anything that deviates from that, surprises us. In moments like these, it wouldn't hurt to have the Beatles echoing loudly in our ears, "Let it be. Let it be."
So what's the alternative? Thomas Merton said, "One of the best things for me when I went to the hermitage was being attentive to the times of the day: when the birds began to sing, and the deer came out of the morning fog, and the sun came up - while in the monastery, summer or winter, Lauds is at the same hour. The reason why we don't take time is a feeling that we have to keep moving. This is a real sickness. Today time is commodity, and for each one of us time is mortgaged. We experience time as unlimited indebtedness. We are sharecroppers of time. We are threatened by a chain reaction: overwork-overstimulation-overcompensation-overkill."
So before we decipher it, let us see it.
Before we wish for another life, let us feel it.
Before we give in to if only, let us hear it.
Before we succumb to someday, let us smell it.
Before we trade in this life, for the life we should have, let us taste this one.
Yesterday in my garden, I cleaned and cleared and pruned and took Advil. In the afternoon, I was serenaded by Pacific Chorus Frogs (who live in our pond and stream). Their serenade began, heartfelt and intense, two days ago. Do frogs have some kind of an alarm? Or a reminder on their amphibian Blackberrys -- it's time to start singing?
Whatever triggers their concert, they make me smile every year. And their song tells me what I need to know.
The present, however discombobulated, is enough.
Sometimes our sky is solid cloud cover. Today, the upper clouds form a layer, like a great batt of insulation (or if you need a sugar hit, like frosting on a chocolate cake). Today that layer forms a straight edge above the western horizon. This line of grey hangs in front of the Olympic Mountain Range. From where I sit, it looks like an enormous window shade, pulled up in order to see the mountains. The Olympics preen on the outside of this heavenly window, and are bathed or swathed in sunlight. There are other clouds, ephemeral and downy, clinging to the peaks and valleys in the mountains. The sun on the snow glistens and shimmers.
