Perhaps the most apt metaphor to describe our hurried and distracted lives is that of a car wash.
When you pull up to a car wash, you are instructed to leave your motor running, to take your hands off the steering wheel and to keep your foot off the brake. The idea is that the machine itself will suck you through.
For most of us, that’s just what our typical day does to us, it sucks us through. We now have radios within our alarm clocks that go off before the alarm actually wakes us. Hence, we are already stimulated before we fully awake. Then we rise to a radio to shower and dress and ready ourselves for work, stimulated by news, music, commentary, etc.
Breakfast and the drive to work follow the same pattern. We listen to the radio, engage in conversation, plan our agenda, stimulated and preoccupied. We spend our day working, necessarily preoccupied, our minds on what we are doing.
When we return home, there is TV, conversation, activities and preoccupations of all kinds. Eventually, we go to bed, where perhaps we read or watch a bit more TV. Finally, we fall asleep.
When, in all of this, did we take time to think, to be contemplative, to pray, to wonder, to appreciate, to simply enjoy, to be restful, to be grateful just for being alive, to be grateful for love, for health, for God?
The day just sucked us through. I suspect that your coffee circles are similar to mine. Where I live, in the few contemplative moments that we do take, we sit around talking: “It’s a rat race. We should do something. We drive too hurriedly, we live too impatiently, we eat too fast, we work too hard, we are too preoccupied, too busy; we don’t take time to smell the flowers!” But nothing changes.
As Mark Twain once said: “It’s like the weather – everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything about it.”
These fine thoughts from Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI will continue to their conclusion tomorrow.
Do YOU feel that YOUR day just sucks YOU through it, like a car wash? What can YOU do about it?
SOME OF THE BEST THINGS GOD WILL DO IN YOUR LIFE WON’T BE ON YOUR SCHEDULE.
This is a Message to share with busy people. And please share my Podcast.