Day 151

 Sunday August 9, 2020 

Drinking coffee in the backyard of this current life is peaceful. It is settling and unsettling all the same. It is usually quiet. I am usually alone. I am usually mindful.  Those are all the entities that create peace for me. It is my world inside the world, but it is the world itself that is unsettling. 

The pandemonium of the world is unsettling.

Since the pandemic began I have been, for the most part, confined to my home.  And since it all began in the spring, naturally, the backyard became a place to go.  The outdoor living room if you will.

So it is with great discord that I find myself here both in the backyard and in this pandemic.

One by choice, one by circumstance.  It is the circumstance that is the hard pill to swallow.

But if I have learned anything during this time of isolation from the outside world, it is the gift of slowness.  The idea of leisure and the certainty that life often moves too quickly, for all of us has opened my eyes to a new love for doing nothing and being alright with it.

  We ought to slow it down. We ought to embrace life as it ticks by, each second piling up into minutes, jamming into hours, squeezing into days and culminating into years.  Becoming our lifetime.  But time's arrow only moves forward.  We cannot go backward into the stream of time.  Only forward.  And where are we headed?  Well, at the risk of sounding morbid...death. 

Or as David Byrne would sing, "We're on the road to nowhere.."

Is that not what death is; nowhere? (to us agnostics anyway)   In the time of the pandemic when life has slowed down we are being reminded to enjoy the little moments.  

Enjoy the small pleasures. Enjoy every tiny task. 

Enjoy the mundane routine of waking and living. Simply said, enjoy being.  Time has not, in fact, slowed down, only we have and that is a good thing.  In his book, In praise of slowness, Carl Honore states, "Inevitably, a life of hurry can become superficial.  When we rush, we skim the surface, and fail to make real connections with the world or people."  This shift to relaxing and enjoying our homes albeit due to stay-at-home orders and a potentially deadly virus is a shift towards clutching the now and holding on to it. Carpe diem has made a comeback in an odd sort of way.

Indeed, seize the day and every minute of it.  See the sun coming in through your window or feel the rays streaming through the trees in your backyard.  Listen to the birds. Smell the fresh cut grass.  Taste every snack.  Be alive with the world around you and with your senses be intimate with this world. (not the pandemonium world, but the one in your home/backyard etc.)

In the words of Franz Kafka, "You don't need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.  Don't even listen, simply wait.  Don't even wait, be quite still and solitary.  The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.  It has no choice."

 Some day the masks will come off and distance will be shorter than six feet and that is when time's arrow will once again fly at full speed.  Still ahead and still towards your one and only demise.  

My hope is that you are late for this rendezvous.