A LIFE THAT TAKES ITS TIME, PART II

"Do Your Best to Enjoy Today"

After all why not?  Why would we ever put NO EFFORT into enjoying our day? We owe ourselves that much.  This week a friend made room for four of us on her patio.  With all the time now to tend and putter at home, her garden was perfect.  Shady, weeded, bursting with color (bright blue hydrangeas), with paths, stone borders and a bubbling fountain.
 

Blue Hydrangea

We all got caught up on how we're coping and who we're missing.  A needed break from the news cycle, which is worse than it has been in many of our lifetimes.  (I'm not going to talk about the disconnect between our president congratulating himself while we have the highest death tally in the world . . . Well, OK, but that one sentence is it.) 

Last night other friends with a lovely back garden, au naturel with volunteer seedlings, wild violets and a hodge podge of paving stones, brick and weathered concrete, had us over.  I feel grateful. 

 

Then this afternoon I went back to Irene and Astrid's A Book that Takes its Time ("A Life that Takes its Time," 6/17/20) and came across these lines from a poem by Octavio Paz (1914-1998), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1990:

  "All is visible and all elusive,

 all is near and can't be touched. . . . 

Time throbbing in my temples repeats 

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

. . .                 

Motionless, 

I stay and go:  I am a pause."

               Between Going and Staying

I think this feels like now. I too am a pause some days.  Things can seem near but unreachable.  The poem is bittersweet. 

Then this: 

   Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. 

This charming book also has a chapter on why we might want to leave our comfort zones.  The author, journalist Caroline Buijs, writes that everyone needs to go on having new experiences if only because they make our lives seem longer.   I never thought of that as a reason for new experiences. Of course, we've all had to postpone many of our anticipated ventures for this year.  But I think it's true that we have also found ways to expand our worlds and that having time to think is something we can use to our advantage. 

I like some of our new habits: entertaining just a few friends at a time and outdoors; shopping quickly and less often; more time with the person I love. Many of us even like having fewer choices. We're all finding new ways to cope with uncertainty, some quite simple like today:  Saturday afternoon skillet-popped corn and a movie.  I hope you're enjoying your day too. 

Midsummer Geranium