Nearer

So often in life, we have moments of awareness of the present moment, an awareness in which we think, “If only…if only this could go on and on, this feeling of peace, of contentment, of quietude.” Such is the present moment for me. The morning’s chores are done, and I have a soft stretch of minutes before I have to travel from my home and enter again the environment that abrades my soul every hour that I am there.

But for now, Jinx is sleeping in his bed near me, his spotted paws twitching as he dreams of chasing or being chased. The (brand spanking new) heat pump is blowing warm air from the register in the floor. The clock is singing its rhythmic tick-tock as the brass pendulum moves back and forth, regular as the tide or my own heart’s life-giving movements. The aroma of coffee is in the air like mist, and a cup of it sits at hand. The shower was warm and good and loosened the arthritic knots of my hands; when I awoke and flexed my fingers, it sounded like someone slowly snapping in half a fistful of angel hair pasta. There is one light on in this room, and it coats the chair and the bookcase with gold, while the Christmas tree sits dark and unplugged in the corner. And my fingers tap away, a quiet, insistent rustling like mice in a pantry. I am aware of the cushion in the small of my back, and of the wool socks on my feet, and of the soap and shampoo, and my skin still tingling from the rough and beautiful scrubbing I gave myself with the towel after the shower did its work.

Have I ever been able to enjoy the small things with the depth I now have? Have I ever looked for those miniature joys with this degree of diligence? When I was a young man, I spent many hours memorizing things as a mental exercise and as a way of showing off. Many of those things have faded like words on a book’s page left open too long in the sunlight. But now I memorize the little daubs and dabs of daily happiness that come to me. When I am alone, or when it is only my wife and me, these things arrive in a steady procession, and each one is picked up, held close, admired, loved, sighed over, and then released into the gulf stream of memory and appreciation and melancholy that flows past me at all waking moments in quiet rooms.

Day by day I draw nearer to…something. I am no longer excited or troubled by ambition, by plans to accomplish something significant. I am troubled by what I see in the world around me. I am unsettled to see how alone I am in my evaluation and ranking of the day’s “notable” events. My soul is unquiet when I think of how many wrongs I may have committed unknowingly or unthinkingly against how many people, and when I wonder if the choppy wake of such things will live on after me, disturbing the calm pond of another living soul?

But in these quiet periods, these gifts, I can enjoy the sense of being, and of life, which I possess, and why do I possess it? And I can take breaths and sip coffee and trace my fingers over the snout of a sleeping dog and I can hear the wind chimes outside as they waltz with the breeze, and I can draw nearer to whatever it is within me that smiles and nods at these fragile and beautiful moments.

~ S.K. Orr