Wasting Time

My favourite spiritual practice.

I know everywhere looks better in the sunshine but I’m convinced that nowhere is more beautiful than the British Isles right now. The sky is a cloudless expanse of blue and beneath it the land is green and pleasant. I can’t stop taking photos because every field, park, and garden suddenly looks like the Platonic ideal of a British field, park, and garden. Usually I feel a bit self-conscious crouching down to feel grass heads or reaching up to smell blossom but this week I couldn’t care less. The sun seems to have melted all my usual resistance to presence and nothing seems more important than savouring every precious, sun-soaked moment I get to be outside.

Phoebe and I have taken to going for a walk after school. She usually brings an ice lolly and, in between licks, she tells me about her day. Sometimes she pauses to climb a tree or to count the breaths it takes to blow the seeds off a dandelion - “one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock...”. Neither of us is in a rush. Teddy gets to sniff to his heart’s content.

Yesterday Phoebe told me that “clumps of daisies” are one of her top beautiful things. I admire her ability to choose. At the moment my top beautiful things are whatever I just encountered. The scent of the lilac I brushed past on my way into the garden, the play of light across the neighbour’s wall, the fluffy gosling who is paddling fast to keep up with his siblings, the iridescence of this beetle’s shell as she crawls across the windowsill on tiny crimson legs.

I feel as though I’ve been delivered from complacency. I’m stunned by the given-ness of Life - the now and now and now of the day unfolding. I’m overwhelmed by the grace of simply being here to witness, experience, and delight in whatever is before me, above me, around me, beneath me. I settle into what Mary Oliver calls “the family of things” and am content to belong. Yes, I know that life is also painful and hard. I know that as I’m writing this terrible things are happening, even under these blue skies. I feel the ache of grief and yet I know I need to keep paying attention. Not as a way to avoid what hurts but because my awareness of the world’s pain and struggle has made me thirsty for a sip of the world’s goodness. While the cup is offered, I will drink as long and deep as I can.

From the perspective of my to-do list I suppose I've been wasting time. I haven't achieved much or planned much or done much of anything really. But I’ve given up on believing that the measure of a good life is a neatly ticked to-do list or a CV full of achievements or even a long list of noble deeds. More and more, I see a good life as a life rooted in loving presence - a life that holds past and future lightly enough to allow attention to be centred on being awake and responsive to what is happening here and now. This life of loving presence is, for me, the essence of the contemplative life. It is not only how we cultivate an awareness of the movement of God in and through all things, it is also how we become one with that movement.

I’m still learning how to live a life of loving presence and most of the time I end the day consoling myself with St Benedict’s words “always we begin again”. Right now, though, there’s a stillness at my centre that is allowing me to breathe deeper, say less, and be with whatever is happening within or around me. The often spinning needle of my soul’s compass is at rest and she is pointing true north.

I didn’t realise I’d forgotten but I’ve remembered it all the same: presence is the gateway to Presence and it's never a waste of time.