A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (9 page)

What could this possibly mean? This automatic response is often spoken with some tone of surrender, defeat, no sound of passion or contentment in their voice. When I hear this now familiar refrain, I cannot help but ask, gently, “Caught up to what?”

Invariably my companion will stop, frozen in time and space, as if they have been suddenly cast into zero gravity. They are silent for a time or cock their heads slightly, confused, as if addressing a visitor from outer space, or like a dog, clueless, trying to grasp some impossible command its owner keeps repeating to no effect. “What,” they seem to think, “could he possibly be talking about?”

Of course, no one has an answer. There is no answer. The question, however, can provoke a most interesting conversation, and it halts, if only for an instant, the habituated trance to just keep moving, get back to going full speed ahead, the ubiquitous “I’m late I’m late,” as each of us plays the white rabbit, watch in hand, scurrying off to no one ever knows quite where.

We are so deeply absorbed in our own personal anguish, striving to gain ground in this war against time, that we often miss the “collateral damage” we unintentionally create. Our whirlwind of fearful rush and hurry saturates our days with the feeling that we are already somehow inexplicably “behind” before we make it out of the house, even before we get out of bed.

As adults rushing headlong into getting “caught up”—especially parents who understandably want to make sure they always do their “best” for their children—we invariably feel we have never given enough, asked enough, scheduled enough, or filled enough time. We worry we might miss something, anything—when in fact our children may very well be having their own experience of a rich, full life just as they are.

But in order to see this, we would have to stop pushing more and more into their tiny, growing lives and instead just be still and listen to what they say, what they know, what they ask. More than additional classes, lessons, adventures or toys, our own children will likely let us know that what they most want, crave, desperately need, is our presence. What they long for most is a single moment of shared presence, to offer us what they have found, what they have seen, something only shared when they feel held by our undistracted, unhurried time and attention.

If we are kind and merciful, let us presume we are in fact trying to “catch up” to something more soothing, peaceful, and nourishing than this frantic, desperate, questing pursuit of everything. But what might that be? What are we trying so hard to get caught up
to
?

The Speed of the Mind and Heart

W
hen we say we are trying to get “caught up” in our busy lives, what are trying to catch up to? And how does it seem to be working?

In his book
Time Shifting
, Stephan Rechtschaffen makes a crucial distinction between what he calls mental time and emotional time. For our purposes, let’s call these mind time and heart time.

Try this simple test: Allow your mind to conjure an image of an elephant; now a tree; now the Statue of Liberty; now your elementary school; now a Volkswagen beetle; now a grocery store; and finally, a television set. Are you having trouble keeping up with the test so far? Probably not. You clearly have a gifted imagination.

Now try this: Allow yourself to feel overjoyed with happiness; now feel really furious and angry; now unbearably sad; now absolutely terrified; now perfectly safe; now passionately in love; now quiet, content, and at peace; finally, become thoroughly despondent and depressed.

How are you doing? Finding it more difficult to keep up? Are you falling behind? Of course you are. Because the mind processes mental information at a much faster speed than the heart can ever process emotional information. The mind
can grasp images, data, forms, shapes, and patterns at an astonishing rate of speed. We notice this when, for those of us who recall, in the early days of the Internet, how unimaginably long it took for the first dial-up connections to load each Web page—sometimes as long as a minute or more for each page. And, if it turned out to be the wrong page—as it often was—then we had to start all over again, redial our connection, or reboot the computer. It seemed like it took forever.

Most of us who use the Internet now have access to some kind of high-speed, broadband connection, and a Web page can load in a few seconds. And guess what? We still get frustrated, even angry that it takes so long! Because our minds can move and shift so swiftly, having to wait those extra seconds for what it wants immediately can feel, for the impatient mind, like an eternity.

But our very human heart requires a great deal more time to process, understand, allow in the rich array of disparate feelings, emotions, spiritual events, however pleasant or deeply painful, however familiar or new. Every emotional state elicits in us a certain amount of confusion, denial, understanding, acceptance, and recognition. Some experiences, such as intense grief, can take years to fully digest. Love, friendship, trust, all these need time, and a great deal of it, before the heart can truly be able to know what it knows.

Unfortunately for our hearts, our culture has designed our technologies to move at the speed of the mind. So our Internet, cell phones, text messages, push-to-talk, instant messaging, faster computer speeds, higher memory, all push us to move faster and faster. Meanwhile our poor, sluggish, inefficient heart—the tortoise in the world of the turbocharged hare—always seems to
need more and more—not less—time. In the midst of the frantic pace of a world hurtling by at light speed, the heart struggles to find some way to keep pace with what is, in fact, a completely impossible and foreign language.

In other words, the heart is trying to “get caught up” to the speed of the mind.

To relentlessly force the tender wisdom, thoughtful reflection, and perceptive honesty of the human heart to conform to the ridiculously impossible, inhuman speed of the world, to its ever-increasing mind-driven technologies, is to cause violence to our most precious and valuable treasure: the necessary guidance of the human heart.

Jesus said,
Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also
. As we build worlds upon worlds of technologies designed to serve our need to get more, do more, have more, make more, speed itself becomes our treasure, the object of our idolatry.

But the slower, more ancient and eternal pace of the deeper knowings of the human heart, regardless of how it may strive and strain, will keep failing and will never, ever manage to get caught up—not to the speed of the mind, not to our technology.

How, then, can we recalibrate the speed of our lives in such a way that it honors, mirrors, and is readily informed by, the speed of the human heart? If we don’t, how can we possibly imagine ever getting “caught up” to anything sacred, deeply authentic, loving, healing, or sufficient? How will we feel we are ever getting closer to catching up with some quiet contentment, sustained in the gentle pace of the heart, of living at the speed of
enough
?

While we habitually think of time as something we use, Mark Nepo offers us a way of allowing ourselves to imagine how we might be used by time:

THE PRACTICE BEFORE THE PRACTICE

In Japan, before an apprentice can
clay up her hands and work the wheel,
she must watch the master potter for weeks.
In Hawaii, before a young man can ever touch
a boat, he must sit on the cliff of his ancestors
and simply watch the sea. In Africa, before the
children are allowed to drum, they must rub
each part of the skin and wood and dream
of the animals whose hearts will guide their
hands. In Vienna, the prodigy must visit the
piano maker before ever fingering a scale; to
see how the keys are carved into place. And
in Switzerland legend has it that before
the watch maker can couple tiny gears,
he must first sit long enough to feel
the passage of time
.

Stillness

We can make our minds so like still water
That beings gather about us that they may see,
It may be, their own images,
And so live for a moment with a clearer,
Perhaps even with a fiercer life
Because of our quiet
.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,
The Celtic Twilight

O
ur lives are infected with a chronic, continuous rush to movement, a habitual busyness of mind, body, and heart. We are forever speaking too much, moving our arms about, in an effort to fill time and space. Let us stop for a moment. Let us explore ourselves and one another, let us rest a while in stillness.
Be still
, says the psalmist,
and know
.

How often do we generate activity for its own sake, how often does our speech consist of mindless chatter, how often do we use words or activity simply to be included in a conversation or to keep away uncomfortable silences? Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, said, “Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.”

And yet. Perhaps our motivations are not always so deeply rooted in a fierce work ethic or a burning desire to help. For if
we do allow ourselves to simply sit quietly with ourselves, we may soon find that we experience feelings of some quietly festering pain or forgotten wound; we may feel more acutely the depth and texture of our weary or even our broken heart, truly taste the poignant sting of tears aching to be shed. In stillness, we may touch with excruciating intimacy the inner landscape of our more tender feelings, which have been so long hidden away.

Afraid we may not be ready to meet forgotten grief or sorrow we might find there, we are reluctant to enter into stillness. But the long, long story of the human heart has revealed again and again that our greatest opportunity for peace, healing, and relief comes only when we are quiet enough to listen carefully to ourselves, to gently alight upon each and every layer of hope and despair, joy and heartbreak, loneliness, love, and peace—and to embrace each of those places with acceptance, kindness, and limitless mercy for ourselves.

When we do, over time we may find ourselves surprised that there is actually nothing so terribly wrong—nothing to take out, nothing to fix, nothing to do, only to bathe our heart with mercy. In this fertile, loving stillness, we may taste a genuine grace or healing, drink from the groundwater of our essential strength and wisdom that flows in endless supply through the chambers of our good hearts.
No one can make muddy water clear
, counsels the Tao Te Ching,
but if one is patient, and it is allowed to remain still, it may gradually become clear of itself
.

A place to be quiet, listen, be still, is not merely a solitary refuge from the noisy busyness of the world. It is not simply an absence of intrusion; it is itself rich and full, a precious resource, fertile ground where we are informed, taught, reminded
of the deepest knowings we require to choose carefully and live well. It is a place which, when the cacophonous clatter of civilization falls away, layers of quieter things reveal themselves, things within us always but rarely heard or recognized in the terrible speed of relentless necessity.

Stillness is a place we hope to carve out of our daily lives, a place to which we can briefly return only after we have ensured that the world will not fall apart, be damaged or destroyed, in our absence. But listen to the way we think—having to “carve out the time”—the very phrase reveals that time for stillness requires a violent cutting away from, or into, something radically removed from our ordinary life.

In art, as in psychology, we find the concepts of
figure
and
ground
. For example, we may ask our children to draw a house or tree that stands on some grassy field, garnished with blue sky and yellow sun. The background scene of grass and sky is the ground; the house, tree, or person is the figure. The relationship of figure to ground is a tool in understanding the human psyche. Just as our child draws what it believes is the ground of the picture, our psyche chooses as its ground certain firm, trustworthy principles: the way the world works, whether it is dangerous or safe, whether it is permanently fixed or can be changed, and so forth. It then populates this inner world with figures—family members, authority figures, lovers, abusers—who perform on this stage, this ground of the world.

Our “ordinary life” in the world is our ground. Stillness is often a neglected, fragile figure lurking somewhere in the background. But what if we were to flip this seemingly reasonable and familiar figure ground relationship of ours? What if, instead,
stillness
became our ground—and the world and
what we do in it became a mere set of occasionally interesting figures that move in and out of our ground of stillness? Here, we would awake in stillness, and leave our home if and when we felt called to “carve out” some time for the world, always returning again and again to the home ground of stillness.

Can we even imagine such a thing?

In the stillness of not moving or speaking, not running or planning, if we allow our eyes to soften and our gaze to alight on whatever color or event, if we listen without hurry or distraction, a world of invisible sounds and sights emerges, as from deep within a misty fog. Trees, the songs of birds, wind rustling leaves, fragrances of earth grass flower, warm sun or cool rain on hand or cheek, a line of poetry recalled, the shape of a cloud, the smell of how this season emerges in this place, the feeling of the breath, an exhale. Without such stillness of attention, how can we ever possibly know what treasures surround us in every moment?