Come Alive

I’ll tell you the moment I decided to delete Instagram off my phone. It happened one day when I noticed I was laughing at the same meme for the second time. I was swiping through stories, laughing my way through disappeared time when I was struck by a sense of familiarity. “I’ve seen this video before,” I thought. The emotion that followed took me a while to process, but now I think I would describe it best with the word “disgust.”

I was disgusted at how much time I had wasted; at how easy it was for me to give away minutes if not hours of my precious time. Most of my disgust, however, was at the fact that I almost didn’t notice I was watching the same video again. Could I really be that oblivious?

My disgust with that moment was an indicator for me — I find that emotions often are. It was an indicator that I don’t want to be the kind of person who gives my precious time away, or the one with such a poor memory that I can’t recall what I’ve consumed. I want more. I want to be more fully alive.

This morning, I was walking on the small path that winds through the woods near my house. I’ve walked this same path before, but even though the paved bits are always in the same place it’s never really the same walk — or the same woods. This morning I was thinking about how quiet it was until I heard a familiar sound — a woodpecker doing his thing high up in a tree. It’s always so crazy to me, the sound they make as they are digging for food in the hook of a branch. It was when I stopped to look that I realized that it wasn’t actually a quiet morning. Dozens of birds fluttered around the clearing. A squirrel was rummaging for the food he’d stashed away a couple months back. The stream in the distance rumbled. This place wasn’t quiet at all — I was just moving too fast and too noisily to notice. And that’s really the problem, isn’t it?

There’s this little book of poetry that my wife keeps on the side table in our living room. I’d like to have read more of them, but for weeks now I just keep coming back to and thinking about the very first one.

Why do people keep asking to see
God's identity papers
when the darkness opening into morning
is more than enough?
Certainly any god might turn away in disgust.
Think of Sheba approaching
the kingdom of Solomon.
Do you think she had to ask,
"Is this the place?"

“I Wake Close to Morning” by Mary Oliver

Mary is talking about our human penchant for missing the wonder right in front of our faces. We are distracted. We are tired. Or perhaps we don’t want to be seen in awe because then we lose our cool.

I think we should be gaping at the tiny wonders of the world around us. Delighted by those insignificant details. They don’t carry the weight of celebrity or ooze with the attractiveness of our media (social or otherwise), but there’s something about them that makes us… come alive. I just received more joy from my 30-minute walk today than I did from binging a entire Netflix season last week. Shouldn’t that fact alone be a truth screaming into our souls?

I’ll be thinking about that woodpecker for a long time.

Andrew