I spent the week in the Berkshires, surrounded by orchards, and grieving daughters, and greening mountains. The days consisted of love and sorrow; of connection and laughter; of recognition of the fleeting nature of our time on this earth. The hours were full of quiet moments and church steeples; of coffee and Kleenex; of swarms of people doing great acts of kindness. I spent the week feeling the lift and swell of both the hills and the heart.
When I returned I had one day to finish my taxes, and a backlog of work, and stressed out clients, and phone messages and emails and bills. One would have thought I went to Narnia and back – the way the two worlds collided. Not even the wardrobe was the same.
Death and taxes, indeed.
There are times in life when the absurdity of it all just strikes you. We carve such tiny slices for meaning – trying to stuff it in the moments between TurboTax and texts – maybe with a quick meditation, or a walk on the beach. But the majority of our time is spent everywhere and anywhere – but nowhere near the quiet center of our own selves.
Sometimes we don’t even recognize “busy” as a problem, because in many years of practice and experience we’ve gotten as quick as the storm around us, and we’ve learned to spin at the same exact speed as the tornado carrying us; here we don’t feel busy is a problem at all, really. In fact, we feel as if we are moving with lightening efficiency across the surface of the day – we feel powerful as we lift off the ground and take all around us with us toward the fury of success. We feel like we are accomplishing a great deal, getting a lot done, being very productive. We feel we are doing life quite well.
But the thing is, winds change. And it all stops without warning, of course, and then we are screwed, as we, and all those we’ve picked up and carried along the way, and all the flotsam and debris, all falls to the ground in one shattering moment, and everything, including you, just lays there breathing heavily and wounded and exhausted beyond belief and wondering what happened. Where all the time went. Why we didn’t slow down and notice the world as we spun wildly and efficiently across it.
It’s not easy to be at the center of our days and stay centered on what matters, and I think it requires practice. Time within the silence, within the eye of the storm; time removed from life as we know it, to build the muscles of life as it was meant to be.
Death comes, and when it does, where will you be? And where will you be when you return again to the world? What will you carry with you, back through the threshold and home again? I hope it’s more than a W-2 and a bank account. I hope you remember the hills. And I hope you remember the heart.
Starting Close 