I’ve been away for two weeks, the first week in Christchurch, the second in Ohakune (think carrots and a snow covered volcano). For my five days in ‘kune I haven’t been able to check my emails.
Not that I was complaining.
After those five days, I open my laptop, which, I might add, is happily unaware of the stream of mindless data that will soon overwhelm it’s electronics to find 102 emails.
102.
In five days.
None of which are spam. 102 emails, from people, asking, telling, informing, retracting, requesting or placating. It’s funny what will happen in five days.
Have you ever had a moment where you inhale, and somewhere between the moment your lungs consume fresh air and the moment you exhale old air everything changes? Sometimes it’s a funeral, getting on a plane, getting off a plane; sometimes you are blissfully unaware of that moment until you become a stranger in your own skin – during some innocuous breath a subtle transformation takes place and retrospect reveals your past self as a familiar stranger. My friend Joel says he doesn’t measure his life in secounds or minutes, but by moments like those ones.
Remember the day you had to make your own lunch – your parents decided you’re big enough to walk to school, you’re big enough to smear peanut butter and jam (they were in the same jar then) on bread.
In that moment we all knew that life was never going to be the same again.
Going away on holiday was a good thing. I think somewhere between email 48 (hi, I’m the president of Obleckia, and I need somewhere to put my $50 million dollars?) and email 98 (can you upload these changes for me? yesterday?) I gained a little perspective. Reply to emails, take phone calls, get busy – get consumed by life and work and taxes, but when you stop – you inhale, sometimes you get a moment of clarity when you realise there is something bigger going on around and in you.
And somehow, if God walked in on you (on the phone, writing an email, whilst making dinner and figuring our your next presentation) and said to you THERE’S MORE THAN THIS! I wouldn’t listen. Maybe I’d agree and make some phonecalls about it. I might even blog about it. But I don’t think it would have the same effect as stopping, inhaling, waiting…listening.
Have you ever heard the saying: ‘Be still and know that I am God’. Whether or not you believe in God (or god), you’ve got to agree with me on one thing – you’re not God (and if you are – five words: All Blacks, Tri Nations, Please). We’re not supposed to have everything figured out, because we’re human. We’re built to trust.
Imagine if we never stopped. If we only breathed stale, unchanging air. If we kept doing the mundane until life became the mundane.
Inhale.
Be still.
Make space for clarity.
Exhale. Then leave a comment.
I have trouble being serious for a whole post, mostly because I don’t think it’s healthy to take myself too seriously. I feel awkward writing posts like this one because I feel like if I do I have to go an listen to Dashboard Confessional and stop eating steak. In light of my worldview that general silliness helps overly emo blogs like this one – check out strongbad’s strategy for email management.
