Pay
Attention
“Some
infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
John Green
(The Fault in Our Stars)
Have you noticed the
truth of this quote? The porch where I sit to write is on the second
floor of my house, so it's at tree branch level. I've been watching a
pair of squirrels chasing each other around the oak tree just a few
feet away. Neither ever catches the other, but they make a scratchy,
chirpy racket of trying. Yesterday, when I was here, the scree of a hawk
called out loudly overhead, and the squirrel on the tree plastered
itself against the trunk—as flat as possible. I could
almost hear it say, “Nothing to see here! Just tree bark.” And it
really did blend perfectly. I suspect, however, that the sharp eyes
of the hawk could clearly see what was squirrel and what was not. The
infinity of a squirrel, after all, is shorter than the infinity of a
hawk.
Sometimes, you meet
someone—say on an airplane. You spend the whole four hour flight
talking together as though you are old friends. You tell this
stranger many secrets that even your mother doesn't know. Likewise,
they tell you their own. And then the plane lands, and you go your
separate ways, never to cross paths again. A chance encounter?
A meaningless coming together? I don't think so. It's just that some
infinities are smaller than others.
A friend of my friend
died unexpectedly this week. My friend had known this woman for
twenty-five years. They met with two other women every month to
converse about life and to share their goings-on with one another. It
was a foursome that had endured through the growing up of children, illnesses, divorces, the death of a spouse, the births of grand children, and many other trials and joys of
life. And then, out of the blue, one of them died—the
youngest of the group of four. And the other three are devastated. We
never expect our infinities to end. The feeling when they do is a
mixture of gratitude for the length of time we had with them,, and
the stark realization that we wanted more. There may be a sense of
being cheated out of something we thought would endure forever.
The lesson here, at least
for me, is to appreciate what I have today—the small infinity of
this hour, this day. It's a call, as clear as the scree of the
airborne hawk, to pay attention to this moment, this day, this
person. Souls meet, and we don't know how large or how small our
infinity may be. Best not to miss a single one.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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