Keep The Slowness With You
Shouldn’t the moments of our life stick with us?
Since the emergence of coronavirus, my husband and I walk every day.
It’s the way we “end” our workday — we close the laptops and put down the phones and put our ‘out of office’ alert on our email accounts, and go or a walk around our neighborhood.
Before the virus, we walked. Sometimes we ran. Either way — we spent our weekend mornings outside and wandering around our neighborhood before this virus ever happened.
Now, we do it more.
Now, we pay closer attention to our surroundings, too.
We stop to marvel at what the magnolia trees look like as they bloom against the blue of the sky.
We delight in the colors of the cherry blossom trees that we see around our neighborhood and stop and marvel at the water as we stand at the edge of the bay.
We listen to the birds and start to recognize their song, too.
It’s lovely — but I have to remind myself that those magnolia trees have always been there. The cherry blossoms have stood there, too — and so has the bay, the waves, and the shoreline.
The birds were singing before the coronavirus happened — but we just stop moving long enough to listen to them now.
We move slower in this quarantine time — and I hope we take a bit of that slowness with us as we head into the future.
As we move into tomorrow and start to reopen schools and businesses and find the balance of the new normal that will inevitably have to come, I hope we carry some of the lessons that we’ve learned during this time.
I hope we’re not as quick to rush from one point to another.
I hope we’re not as quick to schedule meetings on top of meetings.
I hope we’re not as quick to pack our social calendars with event after event.
The more we cram into our days, the more we glaze over and hit a wall. At a certain point, if we’re moving too fast, it all blends together — and nothing we say or do sticks with us.
And shouldn’t the moments of our life stick with us?
Shouldn’t the people that we spend our time with have our undivided attention? Shouldn’t the way we spend our days mean something to both our heads and our hearts?
I get it, there are things in life that aren’t going to be fun, and most of us cannot live a life of leisure twenty-four seven.
But, perhaps we can begin to take the time to linger in the conversations that mean something to us — that we are there, face to face with the ones that we love.
Perhaps we can say “no” to an overflowing schedule so that we can say “yes” to being there for the ones that we love.
Perhaps we can leave room in our schedules for the mundane — so that we can see the miracles that can come from tiny seeds.
Perhaps we can stop rushing on our walks so that we can listen to the birds’ songs.
Perhaps.
