Monday, February 22, 2016

The Battle to Behold Beauty In The Everyday



 Sloth and frantic busyness are two sides of a pendulum.  I slept in today.  There’s always a niggling voice when I sleep in saying; “You are wasting the day away!” The voice doesn’t realize that being busy isn’t necessarily a sign of accomplishing anything either.  It feels like stuff has been accomplished though so we feel better.

The mountains are still snow-capped.  It is seventy plus degrees outside with a cooling wind.  Today’s bicycle ride was wonderful; I don’t know if it was the sleep or the change in weather but I felt exhilarated.  I pedaled and thought about beauty. 

I queued Queen on Spotify---don’t ask me why.  Listening to ‘You Take My Breath Away,’ I remembered why. I enjoy their music.  Though not the gospel music I usually listen to; there’s a beauty that overarches the earthiness of most of Mercury.

There are blocks of time; days and weeks of gray where I live in-between busy and sloth where I just go to work; come home to my wife, touch base with my kid—then do it all over again.  God still exists during these times; I barely live like He does.  It’s a slow-motion-blur. 

When I’m in the mountains or at the beach I think, “It would be great to live here.”  I would miss the beauty living those places as much as I skip over and miss the beauty living life where I’m at.  This noticing beauty; this breathing out thanksgiving, is (like so much of life) a discipline.  A battle to behold beauty in the everyday. 

So I remind myself again (How many times, Lord?) to live fully when the pendulum is swinging hard to busy or bending slow to sloth.  And in the in-between times I trust grace and lean on beauty trusting she’ll pull me out of the gray.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Or, as David Foster Wallace wrote in "This Is Water,"-- "...if you really learn to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down."
--Glenn