Can't I really afford the thirty seconds or minute that I'll have to wait? What happened? What's going on in me?
The only answer I can come up with is that the car has become a symbol of so many of the societal frustrations we experience today. The classic symbol of our independence now often thwarts our progress and becomes an inconvenience and a limit on our freedom, not a means to it.
For a serene life, we need to pay a lot of attention to driving automobiles, whether or not we actually drive.
I propose spending some time getting to know your car—well, not your car, really, but getting to know yourself in your car. Think about how you want to react to other drivers, talk to family members and friends about your common experiences while driving, and perhaps change your expectations of what driving will actually be like for you—more traffic, more delays, more jams.
And if the rage hits you anyway, remember to take a deep breath or two—always do that. Then see what you can come up with to restore serenity. I try to think of the fact that I'm only one of many trying to get somewhere. And if I'm feeling particularly honest, I recall that sometimes I am the one putting on the left turn signal just as the light turns green.
There is no class of person more moved by hate than the motorist.
—C. R. Hewitt
Spend some time with your car today.
two
Making Room for Life
Something from Nothing
When our creative thinking has come to a halt and our thoughts are caught in fruitless repetitive circles, it is time to stop and allow our minds to meander.
This was certainly true for Elias Howe, who lived in the mid-1800s and is credited with inventing the sewing machine. The story goes that one day, as he was working on the sewing machine project, he became particularly frustrated. He had been working with a regular sewing needle and had tried many different ways to mechanize it, with no success.
He decided to take a break from his efforts and sat at the window of his workshop, gazing out in reverie. He later told his wife what happened:
As I wandered in my mind, a remarkable scene came to me. I was in a deep jungle and I was in a big, black pot with a roaring fire under it. I was being cooked alive! A warrior came at me with spear raised and ready to thrust.
But what I noticed at that moment was something very curious about the spear: It had a hole in its tip.
The pivotal discovery in the invention of the sewing machine is that the hole for the thread goes in the tip of the needle, not at its other end, as in a regular needle. The breakthrough had eluded the inventor in his conscious intellectual efforts, but came to him poetically, graphically, in his moment of reverie.
Creativity thrives on doing nothing. In the moments that might seem empty, what has been there all along in some embryonic form is given space and comes to life.
One of the greatest necessities in America, is to discover creative solitude.
—Carl Sandburg
Today, bring the gift of doing nothing to your challenges that need creative solutions.
What We Often Miss
As you might guess, I love epigraphs, those pithy sayings that capture an important idea in a few, happy words. Each of these reflections begins with an epigraph. There are many that I like, but if I had to choose my favorite, on many days I would choose the one above.
Consider the magnificence of the moments when we remember the Ojibwa saying. Any of the moments of your life can become a wonder, any situation you're in can be affected by transcendent joy.
The two of us are in the grocery store, doing the shopping for the week. We are a bit annoyed with each other. You pick out some things, I others. There are a few questions—“Do we have enough milk? How many bagels should we get?”—but mostly we are both focused on what we are doing; our care for each other is not expressed in clear ways. Actually, I am feeling sorry for myself, having to put up with your moods. (But remember, a great wind is bearing us right now dramatically, miraculously across the sky!)
Some friends have stopped by at a very inconvenient time. I have planned a couple of projects that I've wanted to do for a long time. I am trying to be nice, trying to be patient. I wish they would go. I wish they never came. (But remember, a magnificent wind is enfolding us all in its arms and bearing us—imagine!—across the sky!)
Especially when you're feeling sorry for yourself, let your pity be a trigger for a Stillpoint that will transport you across the sky.
Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky.
—Ojibwa saying
Today, be awake to the Great Wind in the midst of stress or routine.
Doing and Being
A middle-aged married couple find themselves trying to deal with a less than perfect marriage. In their discussion the wife asks her husband, a physician, why he spends so much time at work. “What is it you get at work that you don't get at home?”
Her husband answers, “When I'm at work it's the only time I feel like I know who I really am.”
Being a doctor has become who he is, not just what he does. When he is at home there is no need for a doctor, but much need for a husband, father, homemaker, family man, caregiver, short-order cook, Mr. Fix-it, neighbor, playmate, friend, and so on. But he is a doctor and thus cannot respond with any enthusiasm or authenticity to all his other roles.
If he could learn to see that doctoring is something he does, that it is his work, as well as possibly a source of much of joy and fulfillment, then he could be free to do lots of other things as well, and just be himself. As it is, when he returns home he is still a doctor. Most of the time nobody there needs a doctor. So he floats around unengaged, bored, and causing trouble.
Doing nothing can help you if you find yourself in the doctor's situation. Be still and be with yourself. By doing nothing the doing part of you drops away and the being part of you gradually comes alive. It has to, because the doing is gone.
The irony is that the more you separate what you are from what you do, the more you can do!
If you are what you do, when you don't you aren't.
—Quoted by
William Byron, S.J.
Consider: If you were no longer to do what you do, who would you be?
Getting to the True Self
My client was worried. Her mother, a widow of about sixty, had become ill quite suddenly. My client was the only available relative and thus responsible for her mother's care.
When she came in for her weekly session, my client's main concern was about the surgeon who was to
