In a heartbeat
“C’mon, Richard. The light’s green. Let’s go. I don’t know what you’re daydreaming about.”
Sitting in the car at the intersection of Laurier and Nelson, on our way to the office, the thought is unspoken, but the words are forming in my mind.
Tick, tick, tick, tick …
Seemingly, another minute passes – but it’s only been a few more seconds – even as I’m opening my mouth to say something, Richard has noticed the green light, and the car starts to move forward.
“Whoa! Holy lightning!”
A large, red SUV flashes by, a distracted driver focusing on the road ahead, oblivious that a tragic novel remains unwritten because of someone else’s momentary pause.
How many times in life are we blithely unaware that, seconds earlier or later, everything could have changed irrevocably, when the difference between life and death was a breath. Yet, occasionally, we glance to the side and glimpse hooded Death standing in the shadowed doorway as we pass, and sudden comprehension shatters complacency.
The occurrence at Laurier and Nelson was several weeks ago. I would like to say I underwent an epiphany, a St. Paul on his way to Damascus experience, that my life can be divided into a “pre-” and “post-” period. Actually, little has changed. I haven’t embarked on an Oblate version of Eat Pray Love. I haven’t abandoned my job as Treasurer, set off for adventures, discovering new meaning in life. I haven’t even stopped getting into the car with Fr. Richard! So much of life is a daily routine: get up, shower, have breakfast, pray, go to work, come home from work, eat, pray, read and go to bed. The next day, do it all over again. Life generally flows onward with very ordinary events that leave me saying, “I don’t know what I did all day, but it took me all day to do it.” Should it be different? Should every day be filled with excitement and memorable adventures?
Working with teenagers, I would ask how they were doing and came to expect the almost inevitable response, “I’m bored.” I would laugh and say, “When I was growing up, I only said once in my life to my parents that I was bored; they cured my boredom.”
“Cured it? What do you mean, Brother?”
“With a big smile, they pulled out a list of about three hundred things that needed to be done, starting with getting the basement cleaned up, and told me that should fix my boredom. It did. I learned to keep myself busy … and never to say I was bored!” I think they were more inspired by me surviving my home life than they were by the lesson I learned.
Even the occasions we count as being memorable too quickly lose their edge. Several years after I started teaching in Sandy Bay, Brent took me for a boat ride on the Churchill River. I was mesmerized by the endless water, rock, trees and scents of the boreal forest.
A nudge on my shoulder … “Brother, look, an eagle.”
“Wow! A bald eagle … I’ve never seen one so close. Isn’t that something!” I grab the binoculars and track the majestic bird until it circles higher and higher out of sight.
More trees, more water, more droning of the outboard motor.
Another nudge on the shoulder, “An eagle, Brother. Over there, on top of the tree.”
“Oh, wow! There are two of them. And a nest! I’ve never seen an eagle’s nest.”
More droning motor, more overhanging trees reflected in the still water until fractured by the wake of our passing boat.
“Another eagle … no, there are three over there, Brother.”
Pause … “Aren’t there any other birds here? Are there just eagles?”
How quickly mesmerizing morphs into monotonous; thrill transitions into tedium.
Perhaps the idea that being close enough to count the teeth of a distracted SUV driver should be a life-changing event is our distraction. Maybe, it’s the daily rhythm of enjoying the morning shower, the well-trodden words of the psalter’s four-week cycle, the morning walk to work, the ‘doing whatever it is you do as Treasurer’ every day, ordinary conversations around the supper table and an evening once again immersed in familiar literature, the everyday things of life, where meaning is found.
William Wordsworth, pensively reflects, in Tintern Abbey, how the bucolic beauty of the River Wye, experienced five years earlier, changed him.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: – feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.
No wild spectacles, no once-in-a lifetime-events … just secluded landscapes, quiet skies, and wreaths of smoke rising amidst the copses, he muses, might the impetus for us to become better people.
There’s something to be said for eagles on the Churchill River and SUVs in Ottawa. The invitation is to find as much meaning in the unassuming concrete as there is in the skyscrapers it builds.
By Harley Mapes, OMI
