My Sabbath Resolution
They say you need to “Slow Down to See the Beauty”…
[First Published on Facebook. June 2007]
Ever since ending my days as a University student, I’ve found my self travelling by car more and more and walking less and less। I am not a fitness freak — but I did begin to feel that I was missing out on a fairly decent bit of exercise. So I came up with a unique (if not slightly unusual) remedy to the predicament: My “Sabbath Resolution”
I resolved not to travel by car (or any other form of transport utilizing combustion engines) from dawn to dusk on Saturdays.
That was some time ago. Now my typical Saturday chores are all done in pedis. If, on a hot Saturday afternoon, you chance to see a guy trekking the boulevards of Colombo, with a knap-sack on his back, a smile on his face, a song on his lips and Wrigley’s in his mouth, that’s probably me.
Something that I’ve noticed on my road rambles is that I seem to “bump into” people I know (literally) in the most unlikely places (geographically, not anatomically). Even more intriguing is that I meet people in places where I just happen to be “by chance”, who also in turn happen to be in those places “just by chance”. For example (and this is just one of quite a handful), I always seem to encounter a certain old friend of mine in her car at the Lipton Circus traffic lights. The odd thing is that this is not necessarily at some particular time of the day — she’s not there for any particular reason — nor am I. I don’t know whether it’s just that I am remembering and “noticing” these close encounters more vividly while on foot, or whether probability is playing some kind of a trick. Whatever it is, it seems to have changed the way I look at…well…things. Are we mssing out on some things in this world? Do we listen when we should? Or do we even know that we should listen?
By now, my Sabbath Resolution has settled in nicely as a habit. Yesterday, I was passing townhall on my way home. It was around 6.45 in the evening. Sunset. The breeze was really cool (in every sense of the word). In the backdrop of the townhall was a sky that was a mixture of emerald and sapphire. The earliest stars were coming to radiance and the crows returning to nest seemed to soar over the twinkles…I know this is just a typical view of boring old Colombo — but from a certain angle it does look different, even beautiful…
So, what have I really gained from my Sabbath Resolution? A few pounds saved, definitely, but anything else? Maybe I’ve started to realize that that you need to “Slow Down to See the Beauty”…
“Slow Down to See Life”…
“Slow Down to really understand”…
