Timeless Gifts

How will I remember summer 2012? Since I returned home from Ecuador, my days have been flooded with an excess of free time. What a gift! So much time to just be, with myself, my thoughts. As I enjoy the relaxation that comes with just being, my mind seems to enjoy a free-for-all, hyper speed, overdrive version of that experience. The mind doesn’t like quiet. It likes stimulation, production, distraction. So the silence is often disturbed by unimportant thoughts which distract me from the moment of calm that I know have the right to accept.

So from this moment on, I choose to embrace the moment in front of me. I can recognize the difference between thoughtful reflection and meaningless mumble-jumble of the brain. That’s the great thing about life, and time: there is no wasted time, and we can, at any point, decide to make a shift. To be open to the gift.

As I was driving in my car with my 10 year old brother, Anthony, a few days ago, he broke a bout of silence with a thoughtful question:

Anthony: “If you are traveling at the speed of light, are you traveling forward in time, or is time speeding up around you?”

After a few seconds of pondering this question that I have no ability to answer with any sort of scientific backing, I answered with my own “timeless” perspective: “Well, that’s only if we consider time to be a real thing.”

Without even questioning the possibility that time might not be a real thing, Anthony responded: “Yeah! Imagine… no seconds or minutes or hours!”

Me: “Yeah! Imagine… no difference between this moment and the next.”

Absolutely the most profound conversation I have ever had with a 10 year old.

This conversation took place in the car, on the way to enjoy a morning of climbing around with my little brother in the rocky woods at Panama Rocks. Just one of many gifts that I’ve received during this open time in my life.

Another recent gift I received just a couple of days ago while visiting with my grandparents. Since I was a little girl, Sundays have always been Grandparents’ days. We would gather in the living room at my grandparents’ house to catch up, to just talk, to watch the dogs play. This past Sunday I got the chance to hear my grandfather talk about sailing all the Great Lakes with the Great Lakes Steamship Company. I had no idea he had done this! As a 20 something, my grandfather worked for a season as a deck hand on the coal fueled steamships that transported products to and from ports along the Great Lakes, mainly iron ore and grains.

He talked about the first time he set sail out of Erie, watching the dock move away as the boat set off for the next port, and, with the wind in his face, he thought, “What an adventure this will be.”

My grandfather is humble and doesn’t often talk about the experiences he’s had, but when he does talk about them, he paints a beautiful, nostalgic picture and you can see in his eyes that he can remember the images with clarity. The details are important and make the stories stunning. He described his duties on deck which included sweeping the coal that would get trapped in the rim that ran along the ledge of the ship, into a hole that filtered down to where it was scooped into the coal ovens. In the open air the coal dust would be lifted into the sky, swirling around over the boat, blackening the faces of the men on deck. He laughed at the thought, which suggested a playfulness that the young crew must have enjoyed at the sight of their friends’ soot-covered faces.

As my grandfather tells me this story, my grandmother chimes in that that was the year of her senior prom. The events that occurred in my grandfather’s life – working on the steamships, being drafted to the Korean War, training in Japan, and serving overseas – coincide with milestones in my grandmother’s life at home in Erie. While he recalls life in the barracks, or on ships, or in tents, she had tracked where he was at any given time by pairing that time and location with what she was doing at home. It sounds romantic. And it’s quite a story. But I suspect it was the only way she could manage the distance that those jobs put between them at the start of their marriage.

These are the moments that I relish in this period of free time and I’m grateful that I’m available to receive them. Even though my mind can take over sometimes, there are still those pockets when it’s quiet, and I can appreciate the simplicity, beauty and significance of the moment passing before me. Those are gifts given without warning. Time doesn’t exist when you are paying close attention to the moment in front of you. It doesn’t matter at all. It’s a life-long practice to be attentive to those moments of timelessness.