A Whisper of Wholeness
One can go much further by going nowhere and having deep meaning than by going everywhere with no meaning at all.
Just get me to Friday. I can't count how many times I've said it. Sometimes about a hard week, but just as often about a good one. Get me through this meeting. Past this deadline. On to the next thing. And when Friday finally comes, some part of me is already leaning toward Monday. We rarely notice how much of life we spend standing in the next moment instead of this one. Even vacations get organized into itineraries — seven cities in ten days, every hour accounted for, a phone full of photos of places we never really were. We go everywhere. We cover enormous ground. And somehow we arrive home having been almost nowhere at all.
Years ago, I committed to walking the same prairie path near my home several times a week. Each walk the same limestone trail. The same long stretch of fields filled with what most people would call weeds in their own yard. For weeks it felt like going nowhere, and in a way, in the routine of it all … it was. Every time, I ended up right back where I started. Then one August afternoon, somewhere along a walk I'd taken so many times, I noticed the "weeds" had become a bouquet. Wildflowers were boasting everywhere I looked. They had likely been blooming for weeks. I simply hadn't been present to see them. Not really present. Instead, I had been walking toward the finish line. That prairie has taken me further than most of my travels ever have. Not because it offered more, but because it was quietly waiting for me to stop living ahead of it. Maybe going nowhere was never the problem. It's just the way being now-here seems to a mind in a hurry.
For further reflection
What moment am I trying to get through right now that might be asking me simply to be in it?