Streamline
do less, live more
A few months ago, a young man I went to graduate school with passed away. He was a year younger than me, an avid yoga practitioner and, like me, had an infant son. We had started out grad school as fast friends. The friendship faded somewhat as time went on, and especially as life got busier and more complicated. Nevertheless, his death, was a sucker punch: a pain that came from nowhere and knocked me off my feet.
My friend, Ryan, was not surprised. He received a diagnosis of stage 4 pancreatic cancer and had about a year to prepare and say goodbye to his wife, his son, and his many, many friends. He wrote a letter that was published on Facebook after his passing. There are several phrases from that letter that haunt me. Sometimes the haunting is a friendly ghost, and sometimes it is a restless soul that cannot find peace. One of the phrases that stands out: Appreciate your life, all the moments, even the mundane. I don't even know if I've quote that correctly, but I know that last part--"even the mundane"--because it's been ringing in my ears ever since I read it.
Commuterrific
One of the biggest stressors in my life is that I spend about an hour and a half commuting to work each day and about the same amount of time heading home. Three hours a day in the life of a working mother with two small children is nothing to sneeze at. I spend considerable amounts of this time lamenting that I'm not somewhere else: playing with my children, getting some precious alone time, cleaning my house, or even already at the office getting some work done. But occasionally, Ryan's words echo. That view of the line of cars swooping down the highway as dawn breaks? That's "the mundane" he was talking about. How much would he give to be commuting? Sitting there in that traffic would mean he was heading somewhere. Sitting there in that traffic would mean he would, in a few hours, be heading home to his beloved family. Sitting there in that traffic would mean he was alive.
Maybe some of you are struggling with a similar commute, or some other unavoidable, unpleasant bargain. In the next few posts, I want to share some of the strategies I've adopted to make my commute more meaningful. Would I rather be doing something else? Yes. But here I am, so I'm going to try to appreciate it.
Capture the (mundane) Moments
One of the reasons that my commute is so long is that I work in a rural community. Working in this community for three years now, I've learned more than I ever thought possible about the economy of big farming and seen more types of tractors than I could have imagined existed. There is a type of beauty to the big expanses of fields, alternately in full flower (Did you know that tobacco plants have lovely pink flowers?), plowed clean, and full of nodding cotton balls.
Recognizing this, I started taking pictures along my commute. To keep things as safe as possible, I don't even look at my phone when I'm doing this. I simply point and shoot. I use one of the buttons on the side of my phone to snap the photo, rather than the standard circle in the middle of the screen, because this lets me take the picture without having to fiddle with my phone at all. Typically, by the end of the week, I've taken lots of pictures, most of which I'll discard. But that's OK. It's fun to see again what I saw in the previous week. Sometimes my rearview mirror is in the picture, or I've captured something cool but the sticker on my windshield is in the picture too. I don't edit these out, because this was how it really was. Somehow, it slows the moments down. I'm not just pointlessly driving back and forth, back and forth. I'm capturing moments, moments that will never happen again, moments that I'm grateful to have. This is my life, after all.
