LITMIR.BIZ

      6

      Intentional Living: from Routine to Choice

      It used to be that people didn't need Stopping per se because the natural rhythms of life provided sufficient time for them to achieve a sense of balance between quiet work and active work. There were busy times and leisure times and they tended to balance one another. It was just the way life was.

      This balance was probably the common experience of our grandparents or great-grandparents. The pace of life allowed for time in between events: the time walking to school, to a neighbor's, or to church; and the time of solitary work around the house, shop, or farm. Life on the land was hard, but there were long stretches of winter when people were homebound and the pace slowed to a crawl.

      I can remember, as a boy, loving to drive out with my grandfather to his pig farm in rural northern Ohio. This was in the late ’40s. To me, my grandfather was bigger than life. He was serious but kindly, had an Irish twinkle in his eye, and always greeted me with, “Davit me bye!” My mother was reluctant to let me go with him because I would invariably come home a mess and late for dinner. My grandfather would spend hours checking on the pigs and talking to the farmer who ran the place. But what I did was truly magical. I wandered around the farm—probably never out of eyeshot, or at least earshot, of my grandfather— and explored everything: the barn; the old, rusted machinery; the pigs (I never got too close); and the fields. I was doing nothing but fussin' around, poking about, loafing, hangin' out, and kickin' back.

      For most of us (isn't it sad to think of kids deprived of these aimless times?) such moments don't happen very often any more. They aren't built into the pace of life; we're just too busy. Picture these scenes in your mind's eye:

      On a leafy street in a small town, suburb, or residential part of the city, a woman in her fifties, with graying hair, a calm look on her face, and wearing a simple house dress and apron, is seated in a rocking chair on her front porch on a warm summer afternoon. Her kids are somewhere in the house, in the yard, or off doing things. Her husband is working on the car in the back. From time to time she hears the laughter and shouts of the neighbors' kids playing in a yard nearby. She is shelling fresh peas for dinner. The work is so familiar that she does it methodically, automatically, and without having to think about it. She takes the peas from the colander, separates peas from pods with a practiced movement of her hand, and drums the fresh peas into a bowl. She rocks slowly. Some moments she thinks of the things that need to be done in her yard: The grass needs cutting, I'll have to remind Tommy and Those nasturtiums are taking over everything, I think I'll pull them up and plant some geraniums. Then she's a million miles away, remembering an event from her own childhood; My how I loved to do that, she says to no one and to anyone. The mailman interrupts this reverie and she chats with him a few moments, catching up with his rounds, his arthritis, and the neighbors' comings and goings. The mailman leaves and she sees that among the four pieces of mail is a letter from her sister in Denver. She puts that letter on top and places the little stack of mail on the porch railing. She glances at the letter and looks forward to opening it. She wonders if it has some news about their brother's health and, as she thinks of him, she offers a quick prayer. When she finishes her work and washes her hands, she'll enjoy taking a few moments to read the letter. This whole scene takes maybe twenty minutes or a half hour.

      The banker is writing at his desk. His pen runs dry. He carefully blots the work that he has been doing and puts it aside. He reaches for his inkwell, unscrews the barrel of his pen, and dips it carefully into the inkwell. He engages the lever that will draw ink into the reservoir and pauses to allow the excess ink to spill back into the well. He then reaches into his drawer for a specially kept, small, soft, ink-stained piece of cloth and uses it to wipe the ink from the surface of his pen. He folds and replaces the cloth in the drawer, puts the two parts of the pen together, replaces the inkwell, and returns to his task. This whole scene takes maybe two or three minutes.

      My point here is not to overvalue nostalgic tasks of days-gone-by, but to point out how far we've come from that leisurely pace and to call attention to what was going on in the minds and souls of these people as they lived these quiet moments of their lives.

      As I wandered around my grandfather's farm, I was learning very important information, not only about my physical world—land, pigs and, tractors—but about who I was: “I'm with my grandfather today; he's my mother's father, he's from Ireland; he talks with a brogue, he loves horses and pigs; he has a delivery company. I think he likes to have me with him. . . .” Of course these are not the words or the awareness that would have occurred to a ten-year-old boy, but you can be sure I was learning these things, and much more, too.

      The woman shelling peas has spent her time in a kind of contemplation. As she moved in her soul from her garden to her neighborhood to her childhood to her sister's letter, she too was learning important information about herself: who she is and what she wants. Even the mailman's interruption did not keep her from returning to her contemplation.

      The banker refilling his dry pen sees a metaphor for himself as the busy executive: He is running dry, needing to dip into the well of soul, and he refills his reservoir of energy and patience.

      These are all moments of Stopping. They are moments of remembering, awareness, and contemplation. My point is that these moments—these life-giving, urgently important moments that slow life down so that we don't miss the important parts—are rare for us now. The good and hopeful news is that we can—and I believe must—make intentional choices to make them happen for ourselves. Because life no longer offers such pauses naturally, we can intentionally create times with little to do and of quiet work. We can place the seemingly blank spaces, the spaces that help us to learn important things, between the events of life. Just as we have had to make specific choices to get sufficient physical exercise, so we now have to make choices to put spaces in our lives, spaces with nothing to do. Creating these spaces is the purpose of Stopping.

      Parents can help create safe but unstructured time, time with nothing to do, but with adventuresome space to do it in, for their kids. You might not shell peas, but you probably wash dishes, cut vegetables, mow grass, fold laundry, and do other things. If you don't have a fountain pen to use as a metaphor for refilling your reservoir, you probably have a gas tank. The moments that naturally occur for us are probably not as quiet as they were in years gone by, nor as naturally conducive to contemplation, but that's not a problem. If we first are Stopped enough to notice them, we can change many of those moments from annoyances to life-enhancing opportunities.

      Stopping ultimately has the same purpose of intentional living as American naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau had in 1845 when he went to live at Walden Pond: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” In the millennial era, most of us can't retire to the woods, so we have to create the Walden moments for ourselves.

      Millions of persons long for immortalitywho do not know what to do withthemselves on a rainy afternoon.

      SUSAN ERTZ