Awake to life
The narrator of one of Alice Munro’s short stories described a middle aged woman this way: “Here she sat and saw her day as hurdles got through. Not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well, good, now that’s over, that’s over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this was over?” (Selected Stories, 1997).
Sometimes it’s that way for us, I think. We live with the dull ache of low expectations: just get through the next thing, get it over with, move on to the next thing, and get it over with, too. Endure today, then tomorrow, and a series of tomorrows after that. We’re not living our lives; they’re living us. We might as well be sleepwalking, because we aren’t awake to ourselves, to others, or to the wonders and possibilities around us.
It’s not easy staying awake, though. You know that feeling you have after Thanksgiving dinner—stuffed, hardly able to keep your eyes open, and wanting nothing more than a long nap? I think something like that happens to our minds and hearts. They’re overfilled with all the ideas, images, issues, and demands which come at us from e-mail, voice mail, text and Facebook messages, RSS feeds, snail mail, memos, reports, television, radio, billboards, magazines, newspapers, coworkers, family members, and strangers on the street. All these things work their way into our psyches, make claims on our capacity for awareness, and take away from our limited supply of time and energy.
