The Art Of Notcing: When to be still.

This morning I spent a whole lot of time doing nothing. Well, truth be told, the first two hours of my day were full and happy — all breakfasts, and lunch making, and the unpacking of groceries delivered pre-dawn to the door. I wrap sandwiches, I help with homework, I scrape dishes. Then one child leaves at 8, the other at 9. And then….and then….

This is the drifting time for me. Too early for my natural work-rhythms to kick in. (I rarely write before noon.) Too late to go back to sleep. Most days I take this opportunity to  go the gym, before email and tasks intervene. But today I am ride-less and the gym is too far away. So I drift. I eat a little something. I take a bath. I read a book. And the entire time — every. single. minute. — I am thinking: “I should not be doing something.”

When I suffered from chronic pain, I often had to rest most of the morning — or even most of the day. Now that I am (mostly) recovered, that physical need has abated. And yet today I wanted to lolly-gag. To be still. To go fallow.

My heart and body wanted to drift. My head was telling me otherwise.
“You should be doing something,” my Gremlins chattered at me in my skull.
“What?” I asked.

They had no answer.

Finally, too annoyed by the Gremlin voices, I put aside my book and got up to take a shower. The bathroom is sparkling clean today, and I noticed how nice it looks after it’s scrubbing.  Something as silly as the shiny-white porcelain of the toilet reminded me: “Oh! Noticing! I’m supposed to be noticing!” So I resolved, right there with the toilet bowl, to pay more attention. And as I flicked the shower curtain open I noticed something.

I didn’t need to do anything this morning but be.

Sure there is work to be done, but none of it pressing. There’s always another blog post to write, more email to answer. Or on the home front, there’s always dishes waiting in the sink, corners to be dusted. But really. Does it matter? No one is truly in need of me right now. And not even Martha Stewart cares if my mantle is dusted.

And it’s true, it is, that Jenn is swamped with homework and Paul is working long hours, and any number of people I know are over-committed and overworked. There is no doubt about that. But me scurrying about doing unnecessary tasks is not  going to change that. Me being busy just to be busy is not going to help one whit.

What if my job is to be present to my body right now? To honor this mysterious call to drift? To act on this soulful need to be fallow?
What if I just notice that this is the call of my be-ing for today?
What if I trust God, myself, and The Universe to tell me when to rest and when to act?
What if I believe that if I honor this impulse–right now–to do little, that it will in the future relase me to serve much?

What if I sit still this morning, and practice being enough.

For awhile now I have been asking: Where does soulcare and worldcare meet? Is there a model that allows us to take care ourselves and serve the world?  Where is the place where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meets? 

Perhaps it is here, in the noticing. 

The reality is, “I know my call, despite my faults and despite my growing fears.” The only thing to do is to attend to the task at hand. To notice that my hand is on the plow, even if the row I am furrowing does not look the way I expected it to. Even if the ground looks like it is lying fallow.

Somehow, in the mysterious now, I know this to be true.

Amen.

Tagged as: the art of noticing, the presence project