“We all have fallen victim at one time or another to the relentless cycle of our children’s playdates and after-school lessons, to the push for their academic and athletic accomplishments, and to their endless desires for the latest toy, video game, or designer sneakers. The adage of our age seems to be “Get more out of life!” And we do our best to obey. Grab a snack, round up the kids, and we’re out the door—to do, or buy, or learn something more.
But in our efforts to make each moment “count,” we seem to have lost the knack of appreciating the ordinary. We provide our children with so much that the extraordinary isn’t special anymore, and the subtle rhythms of daily life elude us altogether. We do too much and savor too little. We mistake activity for happiness, and so we stuff our children’s days with activities, and their heads with information, when we ought to be feeding their souls instead. I know a mother who came upon her two-year-old sitting alone, lost in a daydream, and worried that he was “wasting time.”
Over the years, I have learned to quit speeding through life, but it is a lesson I must take up and learn again every day, for the world conspires to keep us all moving fast. I have found that it is much easier for me to stay busy than to make a commitment to empty time—not surprising, perhaps, in a culture that seems to equate being busy with being alive. Yet if we don’t attend to life’s small rituals, if we can’t find time to savor “dailiness,” then we really are impoverished. Our agendas starve our souls...
When I stop speeding through life, I find the joy in each day’s doings, in the life that cannot be bought, but only discovered, created, savored, and lived. ”
