Photo by Danila Hamsterman on Unsplash
Isn’t it wild, the way that they just drop a full extra day into our year without discussion or permission? It’s kind of like having the audacity to bring your kid’s best friend to the baby sitter for the day as if it’s nothing. I mean, it’s not even an alternating extra hour of sleep like daylight saving time, or if, at the very least, they politely turned it into an extra weekend day. Most people had to get up and go to work, pay for daycare, buy an additional venti almond milk half shot no whip latte, and then later go home and cook dinner. It’s kind of outrageous. Is there some kind of board or committee we can take this up with?
I suppose all the seize the day people loved it. But what about you? It’s already March and it’s probably too late to contact anyone to complain about it so we’ll have to just keep stepping. It doesn’t mean we’re okay with it but we’re moving on from that kind of February appropriation. We’ve got things to do and March is already in full swing. It seems like a good time to take inventory while the year is still fresh, kind of a quarterly check in if you will. So how are you, what’s up, what’s new, howzit, or my personal favorite, how you livin? I wish I could say that more often but I don’t think I’m cool or young enough to pull it off. It’s just the best one of them all because I think it’s much harder to say that and breeze by someone without waiting for an answer. How are you living? There’s weight to that question that demands a thoughtful answer. It kind of stops you for a minute. Are you fine, chilling, seizing the day, getting by, or living every day like it’s your last? Is that even good advice? I’ve always thought so. There are lots of ways to live. Tomorrow is not promised and healthy tomorrows are often a precious uncontrollable variable, so it seems like a good strategy. A lot of the time we live life on automatic pilot and we sometimes need a reminder to live and love more fully.
Three weeks ago our family welcomed a new baby. I had the privilege to be there as my daughter went through labour and as her baby boy experienced his first hour of life. I was able to witness the absolute delight of the new parents and I got to inhale the fresh from heaven scent of newborn life. Newborn babies are magic. You know that as soon as you hold one. But before you get to hold them, they go from floating in an ever shrinking apartment with a non negotiable nine month lease, to all hell breaking loose as they are evicted into a cacophony of sounds and new sensations. Not to mention the cold. It’s like a reverse polar bear swim, going from a balmy 98.6 degree hot tub into the shock of an ice bath. As I have watched that little miracle of new life over the last few weeks, I have been struck by how much a baby has to process so immediately after birth. The blazing bright lights, unmuffled jarring noises, the feel of so many novel things against their delicate skin, hunger that you now have to work to satisfy. Everything is new. To a baby, it’s all about comfort. They know when they’re comfortable and they loudly protest when they aren’t. But they bring everyone along with them as they experience it all. They challenge our complacency and blindness as they take us back to when we didn’t know anything and we weren’t bored with it all. I know the joy we are about to encounter as we experience life through his five senses. Right now, he has to trust everyone. His life depends on it. But I am excited for his parents as he begins to focus and recognize them as his lifeline, as he learns to smile when he sees their faces and as he begins to discover all the new things his world has to offer. It was my very favorite part of raising my own children; watching as they spent long moments looking at, reaching for and figuring out how things feel, taste, sound, smell, look and work. I loved to watch them and their reactions and to help them navigate it all. It was a gift to look at things with new eyes and to realize how much there was to experience on an ordinary day, in all the things I no longer even noticed. Which brings me back to how we’re living. Carpe Diem and cramming it full of everything is all well and good. We should take advantage of all this life offers us. We should treasure every moment. It occurred to me though, that the things that usually remind us to live every day like it’s your last, are often devastating losses. We are jolted into remembering that everything ends, people die and time is of the essence. So it’s good advice but it made me think about how tinged it is with desperation. It’s a focus on scarcity with an almost predictable rebound to greedy excess. Because if it was our last day, I think we would feel frantic with the realization that we wanted to be everywhere, eat everything, visit everyone, hold onto it all. It feels rushed, urgent, self focused and possibly fueled by regret.
So I’m intrigued by the thought that a better strategy for life might be cultivating wonder and curiosity instead. Maybe we should utilize the unintended plan of the newborn baby to just learn to focus his eyes, and then, see the absolute miracle in every new thing. Concentrate on firsts instead of lasts. I can feel my shoulders come down below my chin as I contemplate that for this upcoming quarter. Somewhere in the background, Easy Like Sunday Morning, just started to play. Firsts are extraordinary in that they engage all of our senses by their very unpredictable and often unanticipated nature. Is it possible to move out of cynicism,complacency or neglect, back into our senses and to experience things anew? To begin to look forward to being surprised. To go to the beach as if you’ve never before felt the way that your feet sink into the sand at the ocean’s edge, and to watch as if you’ve never seen a giant wave rush towards you. Is it possible to recapture the euphoria of those moments? I think about heaven sometimes and I hope it’s as amazing as all the people who have had near death experiences say it is. But I wonder if even there, amidst all the love, grace and encompassing light, if maybe just for a moment, we feel a pang of loss for the earthly sensations we all take for granted in the here and now. Do we experience the sun and the wind differently when we can no longer feel it on our skin? Do we remember with longing the taste and feel of ice cream on our tongue, the smell of fresh baked bread, the softness of newborn skin against your cheek, the quiet stillness of an early morning walk, hearing your favorite people’s laughter, or the way it feels to lay in a hammock in the sun with someone you love.
I guess somewhere between the, Live Like You Were Dying, advice of the Tim Mcgraw song and Louis Armstrong’s, It’s a Wonderful World, lies the secret and the answer. Likely it’s a jazzy, country collaboration between the two, a commitment to curiosity, wonder, gratitude, abundance and attention. Maybe it’s learning to love people like they were brand new. It might be that it’s the adventure of starting over.
So. How are you living?
It’s only March and we have a full extra day this year to tussle with the answer.
Something to Shay 