Ella and I went to the park this morning, arriving about 5:50 am. (Ella seems to think it is her job - no, vocation - to ensure that I am awoken by no later than 5:30 am every day, week in, week out, fall, winter, spring and summer. Forget weekends, forget holidays, forget what time I made it to bed the night before. At 5:30, occasionally as early as 5:15 or as late as 5:45, I am ... nudged ... awake. Interestingly, since cancer, I have no desire really to "sleep in" (other than a physical need to get some minimum number of hours of sleep). It's as if the cancer experience awoke some physiological awareness in me that there are only so many days in a life, so many hours in a day, and sleep is sleep, a necessary part of life, but not "life" itself.
Anyway, we arrived at the park early and found many cars already there. Then we saw tents going up on the meadow by the rose garden. By the time we had walked the eastern loop, more cars, people wearing official vests, orange cones going up, signs indicating "Athlete Parking" over there, and "Volunteer Parking" over here. Some kind of road race, but not sure what. As a result, the wild life was pretty subdued, even the birds weren't seizing the opportunity to sing for a wider audience, but quieted. Oh, well.
I've been thinking about time, specifically about the span of 60 years. (Okay - I will be 61 in a few weeks, but "span of 60 years" is a neater figure to consider.) As a starting point, I've been considering the malleability of our sense of time, its relativity . How a trip to a new location appears to take a long time, while the return along a known path feels much quicker. You know how you read in the news periodically about scientists learning more about what happened in the first "nanosecond" after the Big Bang? Creation of matter, expansion in space, etc. In brief - a lot! So I've been considering a comparison between what happened in that compressed first nanosecond versus the 60 years thereafter. We're used to thinking about the history of the universe either in those tiny nanosecond chunks or in Carl Sagan's "billions and billions and billions..." of years, not in human lifespans. So I have lived 60 years (so far). What is 60 years? To me it is birth, a childhood, adolescence, youthful rebellion, marriage, children, divorce, single parenthood, spiritual exploration, career, grandchildren, cancer... To a child in so many countries today it is an extremely optimistic expected lifetime. To a fruit fly, it is tens of thousands of generations. To an albatross, a typical lifespan stretching over hundreds of thousands of miles of airborne travels, paired with the same mate.
In the west, how many of us treat our own life span as if a cicada, spending 99% of it unconscious, buried in whatever constitutes our form of the "ground" in which the cicada larva lays and waits for "life": fear, pride, jealousy, envy, indifference, greed - and then awakening at last and trying to cram actual "life" into the last moments it is ours?
Maybe the "slow food" movement should become the "slow life" movement. It might be why David rides bicycles, why H walks. I read this morning that Thoreau is said to have walked at least 3 hours every day. Imagine that. Imagine that today: 3 hours! And not 3 hours to "get somewhere". 3 hours of walking for the sake of walking. Of being while walking. Of noticing. Of paying attention.
To what do any of us pay attention for 3 hours in any given day? Work, maybe, although I doubt if we do so for 3 consecutive hours. More likely in spurts of 20 minutes, broken up by "multi-tasking" in some fashion, by having our attention diverted to something else. Anything else? Even movies, which used to be 90 minutes, don't usually run longer than 2-1/2 hours.
I think one thing I appreciate about T'ai Chi is that it is a slow process. Slow to learn and, learned, slow to practice.
What might happen if we were to start to pay attention? If we were to aim to pay attention in 3 hour periods? If we paid attention to a person we care about for 3 hours? A child. An elder. If we paid attention to a knotty problem - not worried about it, not vacillated between anxiety over it and avoiding it, but paid attention to it? What if we just took Thoreau's example and picked a day and a place and walked for 3 hours, paying attention to where we were?
What might happen?
Peace. In time.
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