Friday, June 21, 2019
6:44 PM
Prelude:
Looking back on random moments can add new perspectives. I recently ran across something I wrote five years ago. I could never have predicted that in the subsequent five years I’d live through a pandemic and experience a personal health challenge, each of which have made the meaning of appreciating the moment so much more relevant.
Here’s what I wrote back then when being busy seemed like the only way to exist. Sharing this reflection now, I’m grateful for the lesson. I wonder how life might feel if we paused more often, and on purpose.
I’ve learned there’s a whole world in each moment, just waiting to be seen.
Summer, 2019
In this moment I'm experiencing the challenge of being IN the moment.
In this moment I hear the traffic on my street. It's not your average residential street. It’s a boulevard. I hear the very distant buzz of a lawnmower or hedge trimmer. I hear the faint beat of the bass blaring from someone's car…it just stopped. I realize how much of the space of now it was occupying as I feel it free up.
I hear the ring in my left ear that fades into white noise most of the time. Now I smell charcoal and fluid, the beginnings of a barbeque.
I see the trees that my front windows face and I notice how much less sunlight comes in as they grow more plush… it's called shade. More welcome on some days than others.
I hear birds making sounds louder than seems possible for their little bodies. Crickets are like that as well.
I feel sleepiness coming over me. Is it because I'm writing? It's called micro-sleep, I recently read. I think about how busy Belle Isle must be today. As I prepare to write the next sentence, I think about how nice my pen is. I got it from a store in Japan. I should have purchased more than two. I label it a distraction.
It seems that I can more easily place myself in the moment by sight, and sound, and not so much by non-physical feeling. Non-physical feeling has past and future with it because to consider how I feel, I have to have a point of reference. That point is past or future, not present. Can I take the point of reference and place it squarely in the now? Is that how it's done? Or can I make space for something timeless to emerge? I've done it before.
The traffic is more pronounced since I opened the windows. I want the air and the breeze, but I can't have it without the noise. It's all or none. There! Just now, there was a 30-second lull in the noise. Enough for me to hear the birds chirping and the sound of the leaves as the breeze moves among them.
It's like being dropped into silence. Not complete silence, but the absence of the noise, long enough to take me in and out of stillness. Micro-stillness, micro-silence, micro-presence. Yin or yang? The noise makes the silence appreciated. So it's all good.
There are benefits to living on this street that begin two blocks from my front door, a stone’s throw from a narrow part of the Detroit River. I can walk to the riverfront or the park at the foot of the bridge, or I can walk over MacArthur Bridge onto Belle Isle Park. There are places to bike, swim, and walk. I ignore them… I've let the benefits get lost in familiarity. I don't head down my front steps and jog toward the park… but I admire that narrative. I don't roll my bike down the 7 stairs to the sidewalk and head for a ride… but I admire that narrative.
I’m watching an hourglass on my writing desk. It fills more slowly, I'm certain. There are three handwritten pages, a micro-sleep, and plenty of sand still at the top. Did it slow down for me?
I see it all in this moment.
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