Friday, August 10, 2007

Alive And Well In Spite Of Noise

One of my readers sent me an email yesterday expressing concern for me because of my reflections on death and mortality. Let me assure everyone that I am not terminally ill nor am I expecting to die anytime soon. I am alive and well and happy! I hope to live a long life and have many more adventures. I do think a lot about time. I think of the time already behind me. I think of the time I am in now and the unknown time ahead of me. Most of my focus, however, is in the present moment which is now. I wish I had a Zen wristwatch. No matter when you look at it, it always says now. There is no yesterday or tomorrow. There is only now. If you think about it, time is only a measurement used in the lives we are currently experiencing. This is no time with God. The true reality is that all of us are in the eternal Now. Our bodies are no more than a vehicle that we are using to travel through our current existence. When they wear out we will upgrade to something else for the next phase of the journey. Personally, I could use an upgrade. My current physical vehicle has a lot of wear and tear on it. My current body is like an old VW van with lots of mileage. In spite of that I think I can get a lot more mileage out of it.

I had dinner with Chloe on Tuesday. Twice a week my wife and I pick her up at the day care. We usually eat at the Dairy Queen. Most of the time it is a quiet meal although Chloe would rather play than eat. Tuesday, however, was a little different. When we walked into the place there was no one but us. No sooner had we ordered our food than a van pulled up with a load of teenagers. It seemed like there were ten or fifteen of them. They were just normal kids having a good time and eating their ice cream. Of course the noise level went up tremendously. They also decided to sit right where we were sitting. Chloe covered her ears and said, "It's too loud! It's too loud"! It reminded me of my wife when I play a Led Zeppelin CD. There was little I could do about it and eventually Chloe got used to it. I was impressed that a small child would be so sensitive about the noise. Even a three year old understands that silence is better than noise. Perhaps we older folks have gotten so used to noise that we have forgotten the beauty of silence. All of us are bombarded by noise all day. Sometimes the noise is sounds and other times the noise is images. Modern people living in the world need to rediscover silence and quiet. We need to sometimes shield ourselves from the overload and bombardment of sound and images. Of course, even when you can't physically do this, you can still learn to quiet your own mind and heart. You can still learn to find the still point within yourself to which you can retreat from the noise and bombardment of images. We all have a getaway within us.

1 comment:

Pat Edwards said...

Last night the neighborhood kids were running around and screaming. I don't have any children and have never become deaf to that high-pitched scream children have -- what I think if one of the worst sounds in the world.