Tag Archives: Mindfulness

Projecting

20 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by in Mindfulness, Seasons, Stress, Summer, Winter

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I have a tendency—and I suspect many people do—to let my mind wander in stressful situations to some point at which the situation has been resolved, is over, or can be comfortably ignored. The first time I remember this happening was when I was ten years old, and I sustained a bad injury. As I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother holding me, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, my mind wandered from the pain and the fear of what had happened to later that evening, when I imagined my mother would make me tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. I saw myself sitting and eating my soup calmly, the injury bandaged, the pain a thing of the past.

I have been involved in a court proceeding lately, which is very stressful. I was sitting in the courthouse a while back waiting for my attorney to meet me and discuss the likelihood of making progress on the case that day. I projected myself forward to later that night, when I had plans to meet some friends for dinner. I heard the laughter of my friends, felt the warmth of the restaurant, and thought about what I might order. That filled a few lonely moments for me.

I think this is a good mechanism for shielding ourselves from too much stress. Why sit there stewing about the problem at hand if simply projecting our thoughts forward to a calmer time can help relieve the pain? But there is also the tendency, in the extremely artificial lives we lead, to project ourselves out of too much, and into later times, thus robbing ourselves of a good portion of life.

We inhabit a ‘living for the weekend’ culture. We spend 5/7 of our lives pining for the other 2/7 of it. Sure, there are some people who love their work, but it is still work, and can’t compare, for pure joy, to the freedom of the weekend. The irony is that many of us actually do more work on the weekends. I am a library director. People truly don’t understand what my work involves, but my to-do list on the average day includes 10 to 12 items of varying degrees of urgency. But it’s true, it’s mostly administrative, clerical, paperwork. Some of it is even creative work that can be very gratifying. When I lived on the ranch, my weekends were always 8 to 10 hour days of grass cutting, moving hay, turning manure piles, mending fences, tilling gardens, and much more. But still I pined for the weekend as much as a day laborer who would spend his Saturday and Sunday fishing a quiet stream.

We also wish away whole seasons. I really believe that in the most ancient times, humans hibernated, or did something close to it, when the weather got cold. Remember, the earliest Roman calendar didn’t even count the months of January and February, just skipping those days until spring arrived. But for many centuries now we have evolved a lifestyle in which we expect to be fully engaged every week of every month. But both the cold of winter and the heat of summer wear us down and make us weary and longing for something else.

In older times, people had natural breaks in the year, times when activity slowed down. We still celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, both of which are simply modern takes on ancient harvest festivals. But we don’t understand or pay attention to what they are supposed to be about; they are reduced to special days. Even people who post the Jesus is the Reason for the Season signs miss the operative word in that phrase—the Season. It’s supposed to be a season, a time set aside, a time to rest, recuperate. Instead it’s just a holiday, and work resumes the next day.

But our constant activity wears us down. It does no good to rail that this is an effect of capitalist society—which of course it is; commerce must go on and take no breaks!—nothing will change. For one thing, the people who make out best within that capitalist society vacation in Florida and other warm places in winter, or find lakeside houses and other cool retreats at summer’s height. I know people who spend so much time in their Florida abodes that they have surrendered citizenship in their home state. But of course these are options unavailable to you and me, or to 99.9% of the human population, and the boss doesn’t care.

Is it a problem that we wish away the last several weeks of winter? Groundhog day finds even the most rational among us wondering if the damn rodent saw his shadow. Or that we wish away most of the month of August, pulling our sweaters out of storage the first day the high temperature doesn’t break the 70s? It’s all well and good for the mindfulness crowd to urge you to be present in every moment, or for someone like me who obsesses about the seasons to insist that you should experience every season for what it is: in the end, we are humans, mammals who evolved within the seasons on earth. We can adapt to extremes of heat and cold, but that doesn’t mean we like them.

Fortunately we are also the only animals with a brain large enough to permit special functions like daydreaming about better, more salubrious times. My court case will extend deep into spring. My work is full of special challenges at this moment. I am like all of us in wishing for some magical, blessed, almost definitely non-existent time when everything will be better. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day . . .

Bridges

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Bridges, Mindfulness, Travel

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I was on vacation last week. I took three short trips, one to fish for a few days, one to tour the Abraham Lincoln sites in Springfield, Illinois, and one to visit a relative who is recovering from a recent car crash. Each trip was about a two-hour drive away, so I covered some ground, mostly on highways—I-44, I-55, I-70. Driving along highways is one thing. Most of us do that all the time. Even going to the grocery store or our gym we’re likely to put in a few miles on a highway.

But on each of these trips I crossed at least one bridge. I live in St. Louis, Missouri, so inevitably I am often crossing bridges over the Mississippi River. When you live beside one of the world’s great rivers all your life you tend to lose a sense of its renown, its lore. To me it’s just the big river I see all the time. I also crossed over the Missouri—another major stream—and the Meramec, a local river, mostly known for its disastrous flooding every few years.

I can drive highways all the time without anything more than a sense of time and miles passing. But whenever I cross a bridge I get a rush of feeling, a sudden sense that I am going somewhere. I’m not sure why it is, except perhaps that I am not well-traveled for my age and experience. Most people I know have been many more places: more cities, more states, more countries. My travels have been slight in comparison, and each place I go fills me with a mix of dread and anticipation.

I first felt this way many years ago when I crossed a bridge over some minor river in Tennessee. I was probably headed to a family funeral, I really don’t remember; but I do remember crossing this bridge. At the time I was very smitten with Big Band music, and a tape was playing (yes, a tape) of Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, some such quintessentially American musician, and the rush of feeling in that moment, having crossed from Missouri to Tennessee, one state to another, took the form of how huge is America, all these states, all these regions, and the wonderful music flowed into the moment and filled the space with sound.

But the feeling is not usually that well defined. It’s usually just a sense of crossing from one region to another. The people on this side of the river live one way, the people on that side are different. I will see new things on the other side. I will learn about those things and one day I will return, cross this bridge going the other way and tell my native tribe what I have seen.

Or something like that. I really don’t know how to describe the feeling. I mentioned it once to a traveling companion and she offered little response, just an ‘I see,’ or a ‘hmm.’ I considered trying further explanation, but I turned back inward instead, knowing this was likely not a feeling that could be shared. And yet here I am sharing it on a larger scale. Go figure.

A bridge is an easy symbol, and almost always of good things. A bridge into the future. Building a bridge between people. Bridging the gap. But the good things don’t always come without some danger. One of my favorite children’s stories is The Three Billy Goats Gruff, about the perils of crossing a bridge when there are monsters lurking beneath. But oh, that grass over there is so green, so lush, that it is worth the risk. Thank goodness we have Big Billy Goat Gruff to defeat the troll and lead the way.

I hope that my future holds many bridges to cross, both literally and figuratively. And I guess the point I am trying to make is that for me, all bridges are literal and figurative at the same time, and to tell the truth, I kind of like it that way.

Counting

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by in Counting, Mindfulness, Seasons

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I have an odd habit of counting everything that I do. Perhaps it originates in my lifelong habit of exercise, in which I count repetitions of lifts, squats, and crunches. I count how many stairs I go up, or the steps between my office and a co-worker’s office. I count how many weeds I pull when I’m gardening, and how many times I knead the bread dough. I make to-do lists and count how many tasks I have accomplished in a day. When I’m driving somewhere long distance I count the miles driven, and grow more concentrated on the task of counting the closer I get to the destination. I count weeks in a season, the days of the week, the weeks in a month.

If there is a philosophical foundation to my focus on the seasons as a subject of study, and indeed as a way of life, it is the idea of mindfulness: learning to be present in the moment you’re living, engaged with the people and events here and now, and not focused on imagined futures or tormented pasts. I guess it’s obvious that obsessively counting everything militates against that. It puts an artificial layer over everything.

If I’m walking in a park on a sunny spring day, I should be aware of things around me—the breeze, birdsong, voices of children, splashes of geese as they land in the lake—and not on the 572nd step I’ve taken. 573rd. 574th. It’s all a matter of calming one’s mind to be present in the moment. And while I believe I often calm much of my worry about work, or family, or money, or whatever, I substitute for those things this incessant counting.

I practice yoga usually 5 or 6 days a week. One of the goals of yoga is to calm one’s mind and concentrate on perfect stillness, to listen only to one’s breathing. For this reason many students of the discipline adopt a mantra, some calming word to repeat in the mind to still all other thoughts. It never works for me. I find myself counting the breaths I take while holding each pose. The counting seems to drive out many other thoughts, so maybe that’s good; but the counting itself is a problem.

Humans are obsessed with counting, and the counting of time in the year is the most glaring example of it. We have never been comfortable admitting that counting is our thing, our obsession. We want to believe that the universe is orderly in a perfect, countable way, that our various deities created it just so. We were long loath to admit that it wasn’t really that orderly. We counted by the moon, which was always a mess. Lunar-based religious calendars still in use have holidays happening all over the year. Once we settled on the solar year, or the tropical year, things settled down, but not completely. There is the problem of leap year, making up for the fact that we have laid the year out in a number of days, and once we have counted 365 of them, the universe still has ¼ day hanging there.

When it’s hot we count how many days of summer are left, as if once we pass September 21 someone will flip a switch, the temperature will cool, the leaves will turn, and we can get our sweaters out. In reality these are gradual changes, everything happening on an innumerable continuum. But we don’t stop. What is supposed to by cyclical we try to make linear; what is ineffable we try to tally.

I wish I could stop counting things all the time; but I don’t think the problem is mine alone. I think we all need to think about what purpose our constant enumeration of things serves. And now I will publish this little essay to WordPress, and start counting how many people read it . . .

Bullseye

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Seasons

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I have always enjoyed the game of darts, though believe me, I’m not good at it. An old hand at the game gave me an interesting piece of advice a long time ago which proved to be somewhat helpful. He said that if you want to hit a bullseye, don’t aim at the bullseye. It’s too small, and nobody can hit that. Aim for the center of the next larger ring surrounding the bullseye. It’s easier to hit the middle of something bigger. I know, you are already sputtering with objections that this makes no sense, and it’s all the same thing in the end, just described in different terms. But it’s not.

I live in my own little bullseye of land. Eighteen acres, which for people living on postage-stamp yards in cities and suburbs sounds like a lot. But in the scheme of things, it is not a lot, and the longer I live here, the more I realize this. I have seen this picture that people post on Facebook and elsewhere that shows our whole galaxy spinning away in its immensity. There’s a small arrow pointing to, well, to nothing that you can see, really, and a message below it that reads, ‘You Are Here.’ The idea is that people with strong opinions about every little thing, who are convinced that those opinions matter, might want to put their lives in perspective.

But imagine that the arrow in the picture is a dart, and it is headed to me. It courses through all those stars to our solar system, down to Earth, to North America, to the United States, to eastern Missouri, to Jefferson County, to my patch of land, my own little bullseye. Will the arrow hit me? Is that where I am?

When I write about the seasons, and about climate, I always describe things here in the Great American Midwest. But the Midwest is a huge area, and includes much climatic variation. There is a lot of snow just to the north and west of here, but we have seen none yet this year.

When I run in the morning and the sky is clear, I can’t help but look at the stars all around. Here in late autumn Orion has shifted far to the east, while the Big Dipper still spins in its same basic place overhead. My heart leaps up and out of me, to the stars and beyond. I feel I am part of the universe, mere stardust.

So between child of the stars and American Midwesterner, one of my main concerns has always been to ask where am I? Am I here in High Ridge, Missouri, or am I at the center of something larger? And if it’s something larger, how much larger? And to me, the question is not so much how much larger do I go, but where can I feel that I am the center of something?

If your feelings are important, if your opinions have worth, if your thoughts matter, if your efforts produce something, if your relationships enrich those around you, it is all because you are grounded in something, and finding that something is maybe the greatest goal of life.

I’ll say one thing: this spot of land, for all the work it entails, is the only place I have ever lived that feels like home to me, that feels like it could contain some part of my identity, if only I keep looking for it. It is my own little bullseye, and I am always working to perfect my aim.

 

Standing in the Woods

08 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Education, Healing, Mindfulness, Nature, Seasons

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I am standing still more these days when I visit the woods. I am standing still in these woods which I have visited a hundred times and moved through with the purpose of knowing them, of naming their trees and wildflowers, of hoping to spot their elusive wildlife. I feel I have mapped them well enough now, and I stand inside their tenuous embrace and wait, and wait.

For a year and a half I never saw a snake out here. I saw two today. The first was a speckled king snake, creeping slowly out along the blackberry canes, fat in its midsection with some luckless rodent. It made one feint at threatening me to keep my distance, but mostly it was helpless and lucky that I meant no harm. The second I saw towards dusk as I stood on the verge of the woods in front of the house, a big rat snake, black as spent motor oil, sinuously curled over a high branch above a bird house.

Two days ago I was in the woods just past the back pasture and I saw a turkey scuttle off into the brush. Though the turkeys turn out to dance in the pastures whenever it rains, this was the first time I’d seen one in the woods. I have also seen two coyotes lately, creeping through tall grass, noses to the ground and tracking things I can’t see.

For a year and a half I have trod these woods and fields, looking about, plucking leaves off trees to take back and identify, noting colorful birds to look up and identify and write down on a running list. I know in rough outline where the best paths run, where the steep declines into valleys are easiest to navigate, where the dry creek is likeliest to collect a stream after rain, where the persimmons ripen first, the hickory nuts fall, the skeletons of deer lie. I have mapped the territory and put names to things all around me.

But these encounters with the local wildlife are something new. They come because I am standing still when I visit the woods these days. I am quieter, both literally and figuratively. A snake, a coyote, a turkey. The vultures swimming the blue sky in circles above my head. I know the rat snake and the king snake are nonvenemous; I know that coyotes, though predators, will never threaten me. But there is a thrill of the wild in their nearness.

For a year and a half I trod these woods and fields with purpose, mapping and identifying them. Now I am standing still more, and entering this new phase. The woods are mapping me.

 

Dressing Warmly

24 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Mindfulness, Seasons, Winter

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I’ve written here already about my dislike for how young people lately refuse to dress warmly. Even on the coldest day, you’ll see kids standing at bus stops in short sleeves, no jackets. In stores and restaurants you’ll find them in short pants and flip flops, as if it were July and not January. It bothers me because I think this represents a sense of spoiled entitlement. I don’t need to dress warmly—everywhere I go should be heated to a toasty temperature, and I expect to do any traveling between said blast-heated environments in similarly cozy vehicles. If one of those vehicles breaks down, I am armed with a smart-phone to summon aid, which I believe will arrive long before I have to do anything as drastic as stepping outside for an extended period, say, more than two or three minutes.

Given this somewhat judgmental opinion, I was surprised recently to experience my own lessons in dressing warmly. Where I live now I have much more opportunity than before to get outside. Tending to our pastures and feeding the horses, sure, but I also have more time to just walk in the woods, to explore the hills and valleys and the creek beyond our front yard.

Very early on Sunday morning I was out. It was a cold morning with intermittent snow flurries and an icy mist. Ice had formed on the grasses and the smallest branches, lending everything the fleeting, magical look of a crystal palace. As I walked I gazed around me, looking for something new or surprising, listening for birds. After a while I was distracted by a cold breeze blowing down my neck and I raised up my collar and zipped my jacket higher. I was wearing boots, jeans, thick gloves and a warm knit cap. I was well dressed and I could easily focus my attention on things around me, rather than shivering and worrying about keeping warm.

That’s a lot of what I did last year, in my first winter out here. I’d go to the barn to do some chores, or out to the fields to take care of something, or just want to take a walk in the woods, and I’d find myself wishing I had worn more clothes, a hat or gloves or just a warmer coat. These things didn’t matter in the suburbs. I’d go out to take a walk, find that it was colder than I had suspected, and I’d turn around and head back inside. After all, it’s not like I was going to see or hear or experience anything new, walking from one cul-de-sac to the next. Maybe somebody would have gotten a new car, or put up a new basketball hoop. Wow! Would you look at that!

Out here, I want to be outside. I want to take the time to walk and see and hear things. So I have learned to dress warmly. Yes, it takes a minute longer, both coming and going, but it makes the experience much more worth the time spent.

In my last post I wrote about living in the moment, and how I think that in the West, our inability to do this is very much tied up with seasonal variation. One of my long-time WordPress correspondents, a friend from the UK, said this has never been a problem for her, though she allowed that seasonal variation in Britain is rarely as severe as it is in the U.S. Of course that’s right. Our seasons are severe. Winter can be terribly cold and filled with precipitation. If we want to experience it, instead of pining for it to be over, we need to learn to dress warmly and get out there and see what it’s like.

So I hope I have learned that lesson. It’s a lesson I should have learned when I was a toddler, being dressed by my mother to go out and play in the snow. She fussed over our hats and coats and mittens, not to mention our big rubber boots. But once we were outside we built snowmen, had snowball fights, sledded on steep hills and stood at the back door begging mom to make us snow cream. When we finally came in, warmed by tomato soup and grilled cheese, the last thing we wanted was for winter to be over. The last thing we did was to wish away whole seasons of our young lives.

Living in the Moment

20 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by in Driving, Mindfulness, Seasons

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My drive to work takes me a long way down Highway 30, and passing into St. Louis County I cross a bridge over the Meramec River. It was sunny this morning, and I looked out across the water to see the sunshine on the water and that feeling that one gets when one sees sunshine on water came over me, a summertime feeling, a warmth here in December.

People are, for the most part, pessimists. Life teaches that. I could say to myself how wonderful it is to experience this sunny morning here in December, to find that warm sense of a summer day filling me on the way to work. I could share this experience with the people I work with. But someone would say to me, as someone always does, ‘Yeah, it’s nice today, but we’ll pay for it.’ Meaning that the cold will return; that we have two and a half months at least of frigid days left to go. We’ll see more snow, more frost, more freezing rain and plenty of cloudy days with little sunshine to brighten our mood.

An essential part of Buddhist spirituality is living in the moment. Be here now: experience fully what is in front of you and don’t fret about tomorrow and tomorrow. It is a way of clearing your mind and soul. Live now. But Buddhism developed in India. Here in the West, we have trouble doing this. I think it has to do with seasonal cycles.

India is closer to the equator. Sure, it is a huge area–they call it a ‘subcontinent’– and there are different climatic regimes, including monsoons along the coasts. But it is for the most part a place without well defined seasons. Friedrich Nietzsche called it ‘the bud and the blossom at the same time.’ Its ancient mythologies, as varied as they are, include no notable tales of how seasons come about. Time, as a concept, as something ruling one’s life, is not as pervasive there as it is here.

We live in constant cycles of change. The world about us goes from one thing to the next to the next over and over in our lives. As soon as summer sets in we start thinking about September and the cool days of autumn. As soon as November brings the first frost, we long for April. Given this, it is very difficult to grasp the idea, or achieve the goal, of living in the moment. We tend to live always for a moment in the near future, which, when it arrives, will pass again. This leaves us quite literally pining our lives away waiting for something we know is transitory.

And so I pass over the Meramec, and I appreciate the sunlight gleaming across the water, but with my next breath I begin counting the number of cold days I have yet to endure this winter. So I think that when people say ‘we’ll pay for this,’ it means two things. Nature will present us with more cold days, and soon: that’s a given. But more than that, we will pay out a large portion of our hope, our optimism, our enjoyment of each simple moment in life with our constant pining for a better season.

Everything in Context

01 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Autumn, Cell phones, Context, E-books, E-readers, Fall, Mindfulness, Nature, Seasons, Technology

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I’m driving down the road and I see a woman with a baby stroller. She is staring at a little something in her hand, I can only suppose it is a telephone of some sort. She is probably reading a very important text message from a friend on her phone. Could be the tenth or twentieth very important message that she has received from that same friend today. Meanwhile I note that it is a beautiful autumn day, mild breeze, cool temperature, leaves of many colors and shapes scattered round the stroller where her infant lies, ignored.

The problem with much technology is that it takes us out of context. I wrote several months ago about running with earplugs pumping music into my head. In doing so, I missed things like birdsong and the whispering of breezes in the trees that line the road. I have never liked the idea of running on a treadmill. It’s tedious and artificial compared to actual running outdoors, where I get fresh air and experience the changes of the seasons. But carrying a little radio in my pocket and listening to music while I run removes me one step from the experience at hand.

I read an article yesterday about productivity at work. One of the techniques the productivity expert recommended was to leave your mobile phone or your Blackberry (he called it a ‘crackberry’) at home one day of the week. He suggested Saturday. I wonder how many people truly have to be advised to stop their constant communication with work during the weekend hours? What kind of life is it if you are always, more or less, ‘on call?’

But the thing is, it’s not just work. Increasingly, all of us, all the time, are on call. Almost everyone I know carries a telephone. They turn around and drive back home if they discover they’ve left for any outing, no matter how brief, without it. Then there’s social media, Facebook, Twitter, et al. The classic line in a postcard sent to friends or family, when someone is visiting a place remarkable for its scenery or architecture or just its climatic ambiance is ‘wish you were here.’ Now, we try to make them be here, in real time. We send tweets or post updates to Facebook saying, ‘I am hiking in the forest,’ or ‘I am walking on a beautiful starlit beach’–to which I want to respond, well, you were, but now you’re typing messages on your smart phone.

I am not the biggest fan of e-books, but I do read some. I use a Nook, a simple Nook that is only an e-reader. But already, people are starting to read on iPads and other devices that do many more things. People who really dislike e-books complain that they provide none of the tactile, almost sensual experience of holding a paper book and flipping pages. I understand the feeling, though I think I can get past it. What I can’t get past is the thought of diluting the intellectual and emotional experience of engaging with a text for an extended period because the device I am reading it on can also take me online to send messages, receive updates, and play games.

At work these days, I am in the middle of a project to build a new library. I attend weekly meetings with the general contractor, the architect and the construction manager. Each of these people sets a telephone on the table at the start of the meeting. They are courteous enough to turn off their ring tones, but you see them, during the course of the meeting, tapping its screen, checking on incoming messages, barely able to wait to get onto more important meetings than this one. I am the only person who is fully here, engaged only with what is happening in front of me.

We need to preserve context, which is a way of saying we need to try living in the moment we’re in. In my work and study about the seasons, I am always urging people to learn ways to live in the seasons, to observe the changes of the yearly cycle, to get out and experience them, even if only in small ways. It can enrich your life. It slows things down, makes it seem less like life is just zipping by in an endless round of work days and errands. But we are moving in the opposite direction. When we read, we are also somewhere else. When we talk with friends, we are also somewhere else. When we are working, eating a meal, watching a movie, grocery shopping, doing almost anything imaginable, we are also somewhere else. We are out of context in everything we do. How will we ever learn to experience nature in our daily lives, if we cannot even experience a conversation with a friend without it being diluted by technological intrusions?

And don’t think that I am unaware of the irony that as soon as I finish this post, I will post it to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, in addition to WordPress. When I say ‘we,’ I mean we. I’m working on it. I truly am.

Voices in the Air

15 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Cell phones, climate, Meditation, Mindfulness, Seasons, Weather

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When we were young, my older brother had this little do-it-yourself radio kit he liked to play with. It seemed to me to consist of nothing more than a few wires he strung up on Mom’s clothesline and some dials in a box. He would work at it all afternoon and finally pick up some faint music or someone talking vaguely from the distance. This was the early 1960s, the idea of radio flowing into our ears from multiple personal devices was off in the future: I was mystified by how he could be receiving anything with these wires and knobs. He attempted several ways to explain it to me, but finally condensed it into the only soundbite I recall from his lecture: there are voices in the air, and I’m trying to catch them.

How far we’ve come from this fascination with radio, or with long-distance communication. Now, what was a mystery has become a daily necessity. My daughter dropped her cell phone in the toilet at school the other day. Back home, she asked for rice to nestle it in, there being a rumor that this fixes a phone that has been dropped in the toilet, which, almost inconceivably to me, must be a common problem. Our pantry was not well stocked with rice at the crucial moment, which she took as an obvious sign of bad parenting and let us know about it. She immediately began to plead for a replacement telephone, asserting that each moment she had to spend without it also indicated our lack of parenting skill or concern.

Here’s the thing: I do not have, and I do not use, a cell phone. I’m not sure why, but I think I would rather lose a limb than carry a little telephone around with me all the time. I am fond of Garrison Keillor’s observation that ‘a cell phone makes a man a receptionist.’ I don’t want to be a receptionist. When I leave work, when I am alone, when I should have some quiet time amid a hectic day, I cherish that quiet time. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to hear from you in those moments. I want to listen to Dvorak’s Serenade in A. I want to think about the next chapter of my book. I don’t want a text message telling me that you are driving home in traffic, that you are buying mangoes, that your favorite ballplayer got a hit. Good for you, but I don’t care.

Another blogger whose posts I enjoy reading (emptychalice.com) wrote recently about taking a Spirit Walk: just walking down the street for a distance in silence and being attentive to little things all around. He described the experience as being, in his elegant phrase, ‘a luxury of time.’ How little we do such things! We grow frantic in any moment spent without an electronic interface, some media washing over us, some communication on our devices. My daughter, after a few days of not having her telephone, was livid, stressed and distraught. ‘My life,’ she screamed, with no hint of irony, ‘is on my phone!’ I was embarrassed for both of us. This, more than anything she could have accused me of, made me feel like a bad parent.

When I am writing about the seasons, I am aware that modern life removes us ever more thoroughly from any meaningful interface with them. There are people who get into their cars in the garage, drive to work and park in an indoor parking lot, take the elevator up to their office, and then repeat the whole sequence in reverse, arriving back home to an evening of television without ever setting foot outside. It may be the dead of winter or burning hot summer, but it scarcely matters. We don’t experience it physically, and we keep our minds clogged with ephemera and trivia pumped into us constantly via assorted electronica.

I practice yoga every morning, and have done so for years. Someone asked me the other day if I also meditate, the two being linked in the popular imagination. No, I said, it has been years since I could clear my mind. And it’s true. I am always thinking about things, whether those things are worth a second’s thought or not. I can’t stop. I would like to have the ‘luxury of time,’ I would love to hear if the universe means to tell me anything. There are voices in the air, but we don’t need a kit to capture them. The voices we should be listening for can’t be captured, and most of what we receive is interference and background noise which it gets harder every day to filter out.