Nonurgency
The sun is setting golden behind the trees and my balcony looks like heaven except 100 degrees. Summer is overstaying its welcome already.
I miss the trees. Really seeing them. I miss wide open spaces and the nonurgency of long days moving through them. There's a lot to hold my attention here in the city. Plenty to rush off to, lots to catch up on, the sense that things are extremely important yet easily forgettable. Fleeting.
The secret you never hear is that it can never be fully accomplished. This city life is a steady stream of go-here, do-this, be-better, make-more. A steady stream of appear-successful, don't-forget. A constant queue of attention grabbers and reasons to hurry.
Constant, meaning, can't be stopped. Not by finishing one more task, or getting one more paycheck, or saying, "Let me fix this last problem"...
life will rush on.
The thing about a tree is that nothing happens quickly. Days and hours and storms and heat, sunlight and seasons coming and going, and the tree looks so nearly the same. It is being nourished silently; it is so slowly changing; it is secretly becoming.
All the best things take time. Absent of a crisis, humans and trees and mountains and oceans are meant to grow nonurgently.
It's ok to not notice growth.
It's ok to not be frantic.
Over the long arc of my life, even the blips of rapid change - when things happened so fast the ground seemed unstable beneath me - will have been a long time coming. I will have been planted in firm ground for seasons and years before and after my changing. Even the most unsteadying of growth spurts will have been incubated by slowness.
A tree sprouts leaves pretty suddenly, but they'd been coming all winter.
I think this means we should be less afraid of fast change, because we've been preparing. We've been prepared, even passively, by long slow growth over time, which is the work of God. I think it also means we trust the winter seasons, or the dog-days-of-summer seasons, when nothing moves perceptively and we think we are just standing stagnant. There is no such thing as stagnant when you're living. Something is coming, and if something has come to you, it was on its way all winter.
I miss the trees. Really seeing them. I miss wide open spaces and the nonurgency of long days moving through them. There's a lot to hold my attention here in the city. Plenty to rush off to, lots to catch up on, the sense that things are extremely important yet easily forgettable. Fleeting.
The secret you never hear is that it can never be fully accomplished. This city life is a steady stream of go-here, do-this, be-better, make-more. A steady stream of appear-successful, don't-forget. A constant queue of attention grabbers and reasons to hurry.
Constant, meaning, can't be stopped. Not by finishing one more task, or getting one more paycheck, or saying, "Let me fix this last problem"...
life will rush on.
The thing about a tree is that nothing happens quickly. Days and hours and storms and heat, sunlight and seasons coming and going, and the tree looks so nearly the same. It is being nourished silently; it is so slowly changing; it is secretly becoming.
All the best things take time. Absent of a crisis, humans and trees and mountains and oceans are meant to grow nonurgently.
It's ok to not notice growth.
It's ok to not be frantic.
Over the long arc of my life, even the blips of rapid change - when things happened so fast the ground seemed unstable beneath me - will have been a long time coming. I will have been planted in firm ground for seasons and years before and after my changing. Even the most unsteadying of growth spurts will have been incubated by slowness.
A tree sprouts leaves pretty suddenly, but they'd been coming all winter.
I think this means we should be less afraid of fast change, because we've been preparing. We've been prepared, even passively, by long slow growth over time, which is the work of God. I think it also means we trust the winter seasons, or the dog-days-of-summer seasons, when nothing moves perceptively and we think we are just standing stagnant. There is no such thing as stagnant when you're living. Something is coming, and if something has come to you, it was on its way all winter.
Good words, friend. You would like our back porch. We're in the middle of the chaos but surrounded by trees that insulate us from all of the rush and noise. It's peaceful. I have a lot of little transcendent moments back there with God. Oh, and keep writing. This is good stuff.
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