Awestruck. Part 3

Awestruck

Part 3: Stitching together

I may well just have made a mistake. I have noticed something – that life is ineffably wonderful – good – but have been knocked off course by this, when our task is to notice the beauty and then get on with what we’re doing. Certainly, up till now, I have found it impossible to do both things at the same time. And perhaps it just is impossible. And this discord that I have found – the thing that makes me feel torn – is just one of those mysteries of life that we cannot plumb. But I do want to consider now if it is possible to “stitch together” the two variations of awareness – our awareness of what we’re doing and our awareness of the wonder of being able to do anything. And I wondered just now if I have been “knocked off course” somehow, but this suggests a going wrong in some way. When perhaps I would be better to return to our starting illustration that I have been “stopped in my tracks”. We felt that that was an entirely positive and good experience.

So, I am puzzled, but not too distraught by this mysterious dilemma of wanting to place my attention in two mutually exclusive places, for I am aware that life is something that we do when we’re too busy to notice. As we pay our close attention to what it is that we’re doing, perhaps it is then that we are creating the precious wonder that we then notice the next time we look up. Yet, is there more? I don’t know. But I will explore and see what I can find.

At some point in my teenage years, I became overwhelmed by the beauty of nature and the wonder of life. I remember looking at flowers and the blossom on trees and I could not believe that anything could be so beautiful. This is “ordinary” life, yet it is so extravagantly extraordinary. No wonder, walking home from school, I would look up to the sky and it was just so overwhelmingly obvious that God was beaming down his love. How else could you explain this wonder and love?

Yet you have to go to work. And do the washing up. And go to work again. You get drawn into the tasks of building a career, of making a home, of building a family. You get drawn into routines and many things become oh so familiar. But still, at the corner of your vision, and when you have a moment to look up – and it only takes a moment – there is the wonder and beauty and joy of it all, and you discover that you have not lost it; it has not left you; it has been running alongside you in a racing wave of exhilaration, and of deep peace, keeping you company through all your busyness – though you were far too busy to notice its company – till you looked up again. And there it was. And there it is.