It was the end of an afternoon that had been devoured by haste and busy-ness. I had put aside the housecleaning and trash collection to sit down on the floor and nurse Nicholas,who was uncharacteristically insistent. As I sat there staring off into space, Julianna crawled over to me with a huge grin on her face, as if the sight of me not preoccupied was the best thing that had happened to her all day. She got up on her knees beside me and giggled at her own private joke.
For one moment, time stopped, and my rushed, hazy brain experienced a moment of incredible clarity, in which the wonder of this child very nearly took my breath away. My child. So incredilbly beautiful.
I get so caught up in the business of caring for my children that I take them for granted. I lose sight of how miraculous they really are. All the vast potential of the universe, encapsulated in a single set of 46 (or 47) chromosomes, expanding day by day, drawing from earth and air and water the invisible energy to grow, to learn, to be. What are writing assignments and scrapbooking, beside that?
I am very bad about skimming through life instead of living in the moment. I think we all are. Part of it is the busy-ness of modern life—all the things we think we have to do. Part of it is the nature of adulthood—because some things we do have to do. But it’s more than that. To be quiet is to give up control…because when you turn off your own internal commentary, you never know what you’re going to hear.
Being still is so much more than a negative, than the absence of inner noise. It’s not a passive thing. It’s an active receptivity to the moment—to beauty, to pain, to revelation, to insight. Being receptive means that we’re willing to accept whatever comes to us in the silence—even if what we hear or see or experience requires us to change. Change our minds. Change our behavior. Change our attitude. We instinctively understand that being still is going to move us from the safety of the familiar into the uncomfortable unknown. And so we don’t allow it.
I learned to be still before I was married, when panic and anxiety threatened to overwhelm reason and the gift God was offering to me through Christian. Seeking out silence began as a survival skill, but over time it became the source of my creativity. Paradoxical as it seems, there’s a peace in letting go and drifting on the unknown current, instead of fighting to control a world that is clearly beyond my control.
Parenthood has commandeered much of the time I once used to go into nature and seek out silence. I thought I had adjusted to life without it. But now it is clear to me that I need to find a new way to be still, and to do so regularly. Because I don’t want to blink and discover that I’ve taken my life for granted—my children, my husband, the unprepossessing perfection of a star-speckled night sky. Like Thoreau, I don’t want to wake up one day and discover that the years are gone, and I never really lived them.
Kathleen M. Basi 