I’m sipping my coffee and thinking about delight and awe, and captivating small wonders that press “pause” on some random moment, infusing it with something more than the ordinary.
I strolled around the garden yesterday evening, taking a moment for myself to adjust to being home at the end of a very busy workday. The moment was carved out of the time between dinner and relaxing with my Traveling Partner. I could have been busy on housekeeping but chose, instead, to delight my senses with the garden in Spring. I turned a corner into the side yard, and laughed out loud with pure joy to see a rather large number of small mushrooms had popped up. This is the first Spring for the lawn that my Traveling Partner put in last summer. I’m still smiling about the mushrooms. They aren’t particularly significant or important (or useful to me in any obvious way), they just … please me. It’s enough.
I sit sipping my coffee thinking about how difficult I find it to carve out these small moments of delight for myself lately, and wonder what I could be doing differently to make that easier, and these moments more common. I read something recently about the experience of “awe” or wonder being very good for us cognitively. I know I enjoy those experiences, very much. The joy is reason enough to pursue the experience of awe, wonder, or delight, isn’t it?
I remind myself to start “taking a minute” to really sit with my thoughts, uninterrupted, after work. It’s a helpful practice that reduces how much small shit I’m likely to forget, and that matters.
The weekend is almost here. I think back to a delightful relaxed moment of solitude and thoughtfulness during my recent coastal getaway. I sat alone in the car, as the rain battered every surface. The noise of it was impressive, but not the sort of thing to interrupt my thoughts, quite the opposite; it was easy to focus on my inner experience with the rain drowning out all else.
It’s sometimes difficult to get those moments of solitary thoughtfulness. Doing so often requires explicit expectation-setting, and actually speaking up about the need. For some reason, I find myself reluctant to make a point of doing so, seeking instead to “find” those experiences of solitary reflection arising naturally from the flow of things – and that has proven time and again to be a poor choice. Unreliable at best. I sip my coffee and think that over for some quiet minutes. There’s a real need here. It’s clear I need to “use my words” to meet that need. Why would that make me so uncomfortable in the moment? I sit sipping coffee and thinking…
…The sun rises beyond the windows of the office. The sky is a pale blue streaked with white clouds high in the atmosphere, and dotted here and there with fluffier grayer clouds nearer to the rooftops. I wonder what the weekend weather will be like, and whether I’ll be able to get a hike in, and work in the garden? There is so much to do, too…
…It’s already time to begin again…
Evening Light 