Category Archives: Attentiveness

70 Seconds

When I was home caring for our first son, our mornings were structured around an adventure outside the apartment. We would walk to the library, a museum, or a park, and then head home for lunch and a nap.

One day, I noticed that I always seemed to be rushing to and from these adventures. Rushing to catch the light before it turned red. Always trying to find the fastest way through the city to my destination.

Out of curiosity, I timed myself en route to our farthest adventure at a leisurely pace and then going as fast as I could while still walking.

The difference was 70 seconds.

70 seconds! This was what I gained for giving my attention over to rushing instead of mindful enjoyment of the journey.

I am still often guilty of speeding in this way. It is an ongoing challenge to remind myself that this rushing is not worth that which it sacrifices.

It’s Just Soup

My dad’s dad’s mom used to say this thing when someone was feeling quite wrapped up in the emotional urgency of a difficult situation.  He would remind the person that “you don’t have to drink the soup as hot as it boils.”

For a long time, I took this to mean that I just needed to give a tough situation a few minutes before throwing myself back into the mess, back into the emotional emergency. 

But the other day, my dad reminded me that, often, the situation is not worthy of the emotional emergency I place onto it.  That situation?  Hey, it’s just soup.  

Taken this way, the first seven words of my great-grandmother’s sentence also suffice as quality advice.  You don’t have to drink the soup.

I don’t take this as license to be aloof.  Rather, it is an invitation to hold my inner chatter and my emotional response to a given situation a little less tightly.  And this stance, in reality, frees me to be more thoughtful and generous, rather than obsessed with my own stress response.

So, hey, it is just soup.  And there will be more tomorrow.  

Consume accordingly. 

Fewer Lines

One morning when I was learning to program, I was given a problem and told to write an algorithm to solve it. I dutifully cobbled together a tangle of code and was approaching a workable solution.

Then, one of the instructors looked at my monitor, highlighted every line, pressed delete, and walked away.

At first, I felt panicked. (That had taken me so long to do!)

And then, I felt relieved. I was free to consider the problem in a fresh way, and solved it in a few crisp lines.

It is often difficult to embrace an invitation to step back from “the way I (or we) do things.” But when I do, I am often rewarded with the freedom that comes from simplicity.

The First Cup of Coffee

Ever read anything by Amor Towles?  If you haven’t, and do, expect a treat.  (A Gentleman in Moscow is a brilliant place to start.)

For me, it is like being in the presence of someone who is marvelously attentive, refreshingly insightful, and appreciative of great books.

I read his Rules of Civility about a year ago (so, the beginning of the COVID-times).  I have considered the following bit, from the mouth of the book’s narrator, since.

My father was never much for whining… He certainly didn’t complain about his health as it failed.

But one night near the end, as I was sitting by his bedside trying to entertain him with an anecdote about some nincompoop with whom I worked, out of the blue he shared a reflection which seemed such a non sequitur that I attributed it to delirium. Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.

Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane – the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath – she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the end of his own course, was that this risk should not be taken lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

Order or Control

As much as I think I would like to, I am unable to control all the circumstances of my life. It is simply not possible.

Same thing with the mystery of God. Trying to control the Trinity? That is a tough road.

But what is possible is order: to orient myself toward the stuff of my life such that I am able to react masterfully, faithfully, with love. This may likely mean doing less things and/or, on a given day, doing the important things first.

Close Enough to Love

The first line of Psalm 64 leads a crucial prayer: Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy. In some translations, fear is rendered as dread.

Is this not fascinating? In life, there is plenty of wanting to escape conflict with one’s enemies (real or imaginary) but here, we pray to deliver our lives from dread of these people and conflicts.

Dorothy Day wrote that only when we are delivered from this fear can we get close enough to love. Put another way, in order to love our “enemies,” we have to first pray for the grace to see our dread and to overcome it.

I don’t think that this is something we can do of our own power.

Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy.

Furious or Curious

The experience of anger can be quite involuntary. Something happens, trespassing against our expectations of how things should be, leaving us furious.

Okay. But then what happens.

Anger can quickly turn into self-righteousness, to barricading oneself on the moral high ground. And anger can take the legs out from under our ability to listen perceptively and to relate imaginatively to people who think differently from us. And because of this, anger can handicap any attempt to accurately perceive and productively improve the situation that made us angry in the first place.

We do not always have the choice to be furious. But we can, afterwards and always, choose to be curious.

(Hey!  The above reminds me of the dear Fr. Michael Rossmann, SJ’s recent post on his new Substack blog.  Check it out!)

Pebble Crayons

When our first son was two, I would take him to a toddler Montessori classroom. At the art station, there were a few crayons each shaped like a large pebble.

Our son did not yet know how to hold a regular crayon, but the form of these crayons taught him to. There is just no other way to hold a pebble if you want to write with it. He had to grip it correctly, at the tips of his fingers.

Our interior lives, too, benefit from us finding and using similar tools. Take prayers of thanksgiving, for instance. In this mode of prayer, we tune to the gifts of our lives and orient toward the God who is their origin. Simply by engaging the tool, I am productively oriented toward the stuff of my life.

This was also our hope, also, with the structure of Audacious Ignatius. We aimed to create stanzas and art that stick in the memory and then, when recalled, gracefully and productively orient the reader toward a gem of our tradition. Take for example:

“First, know well that I’m loved even though oh so flawed.
Next, spend time with the Lord and to walk where he trod.
Offer all I possess, beg for my stony-heart thawed,
And act from a deep love, the love that is God.”

These are only three (pithy?) sentences. But when held, they may remind the reader of the depth of their experience with the Spiritual Exercises or uncover a desire to engage with them.

Whatever the topography of our interior lives, let’s find and use the pebble crayons that orient us gracefully and productively.

Deferred Maintenance

Last summer, we bought a 2003 Honda Odyssey from another Foreign Service family who was about to move. I think that they thought they were not going to be able to sell it. They had deferred a great deal of maintenance.

We cleaned the car inside and out. Twice. We replaced the tires, oil, filters, windshield wipers, antifreeze, antifreeze cap, shocks, struts, brake fluid, and brake pads. We greased one of the sliding doors and peeled all the old stickers off of the dash.

The van now runs great and facilitates our on-going family adventure. If we had deferred its maintenance for much longer, it would not have been able to do so.

We can defer maintenance on things that are much more fundamental to our life’s adventure than a vehicle. Our interior lives. Our closest relationships. Connections to the communities that formed us.

Let’s not defer maintenance on these most important things.