I enjoy sitting out in my front yard on summer evenings. Now, that’s not to say that I don’t also enjoy sitting in the back yard, or in certain rooms of the house, or in various and sundry other areas where one may sit. And that’s also not to say that I don’t enjoy sitting in these places on non-summer evenings, like in the winter or spring or fall; and that I don’t like sitting in them in the morning or afternoon or after dark. It’s a simple fact, though, that I first got the idea for this article while I was sitting out in my front yard on a summer evening.
To be more descriptive, I was sitting on the picnic table that’s out in the front yard, not far from the very tall cypress tree and some of the other trees that are spread out. The trees are fairly mature now. When Dad planted them years ago, he said that someday we’d have a lot of nice shade in the yard to enjoy. And he was right, even though at the time it seemed like he was just in a neurotic tree-planting mood.
There used to be a garden in the yard, but now there’s just a nice little patch of plants surrounding the bird bath. Every now and then the yard will be filled with birds and all of their carrying on. On this particular evening, it was fairly quiet, with the summer evening breeze wafting through the branches of the trees and the highway traffic noise humming faintly in the distance.
Directly opposite our yard, across the road, there’s an abandoned lot. My friends and I used to play there well over a decade ago; there was a basketball goal and the broken-down mobile home they left there afforded plenty of scenarios for games of war and cops-and-robbers. But all of that is a distant memory, and to look at it, one wouldn’t guess such games ever took place there. The lot is completely overgrown with grass, weeds, trees, and vines, and you can’t really see the broken-down mobile home, unless – perhaps – you look really hard. Still there’s a certain charm about the place as I look across at it. The wind makes all that greenery sway gently, and you can see the golden rays of the setting sun through the branches.
There are other sounds, too. There’s the pitter-patter of our neighbor’s feet as she goes down the road to her mother’s house next to ours. There’s the traffic noise, and eventually a car will stray into our dead-end neighborhood. Every few minutes there’s a clang as some neighbor on another street is apparently building or fixing something. Other than that, it’s just me and my thoughts – thoughts which it is the point of this article to share.
I was thinking that in this age of computers and televisions, radios and MP3 players, cell phones and appliances, traffic in the air and on the ground, there is probably more noise all around us than there ever was in past generations. Some of it is real noise, like a TV or a radio blaring, and some of it is very subliminal, so under the surface that we really don’t know it’s there most of the time. But I think most of the noise that we’ve created for ourselves can’t be heard at all. It’s a silent but still very palpable noise that we’ve allowed to jar our own inner world.
We’re always going, going, going – rushing onward to the next thing on our schedule or to-do list. We feel uncomfortable if we’re not doing something or getting something important done and out of the way. If that’s not enough, we have a million different sources of information coming at us at once – someone talking at us through a TV screen, or constant music providing a sound track to our daily lives, or a flurry of emails to check. If all of this noise, both real and symbolic, is somehow turned off, we feel not quite ourselves. It’s become part of our routine, but it’s also robbed us of peace in ways we may not realize. It’s deadened our minds and disconnected us from reality. There’s no disputing that many of these technologies are simply part of our world and won’t go away; but do we also feel a sort of attachment to it, a frenetic need to have it in our face at every waking moment?
Have we ever experienced what our forefathers experienced not so very long ago? Theirs was a generation without all of this noise and inward clutter. The sounds around them were natural sounds. The sights they saw were of nature in its raw beauty. Their world had nothing that had to be plugged into an electrical outlet or hooked up to a network or tuned in or out. While it may not be necessary or even wise to do away with all of our technology, perhaps it might not be a bad idea to go and sit somewhere where we can witness the ebb and flow of the universe and sit quietly with our own real thoughts – not somebody else’s. Our forefathers could smell rain in the air, or sense a blizzard on the wind, or hear the wildlife communicating. Today, watching an ant build his colony might be a totally foreign but exotic and exhilarating experience to us.
But what is it that’s often so unsettling about quiet, silence, or solitude? This is not necessarily our generation’s unique phobia (though we struggle with it perhaps more than any other); it’s part of human nature to a degree. Maybe sometimes we’re afraid to sit quietly and face the deeper thoughts of our experience – the unknown, our own frailty, our own mortality, even God Himself. It would do us a lot of good if sometimes we got alone and thought about these things more often, but there is also a natural sense of unease when we do. However, the more we do it, perhaps the more comfortable we will be with it – and maybe our lives will be richer for it.
As I sat I thought also about a related subject, that of our own personal pace of life. We may be able to simplify our daily lives in some areas, and in others we may have no choices. But that isn’t really what I had in mind. I was thinking about the fact that as we get older, life seems to go by faster. We’ve all experienced it; even I, at 25, know a little about it. When we were little, the days dragged by. Now I’m surprised that 2009 is already over half done. What happened? There are the same number of days in a year – 365. There are still seven days in a week, and twenty-four hours in a day, and sixty minutes in an hour, and sixty seconds in a minute. Nothing at all has changed, except perhaps us. Maybe we have chosen to go through life at breakneck speed, rushing to the next thing without even thinking about anything else along the way to where we’re going. We’ve lost, it seems, the wonder of childhood, where everything was new and curious and exciting. Now everything is routine, by-the-book, and familiar.
There’s no easy way to slow down our inner pace of life. Sometimes we have to sit quietly as I mentioned before – not necessarily in the outdoors, but anywhere at all, even if it’s a place as humdrum as the waiting room of a tax office. Maybe we can take more pleasure and more notice in the simplest activities of our lives, like eating a piece of fruit or talking with a family member. Stop every now and then. Pay attention always to the life that is around you. Live every moment to its fullest. Wherever you are, be all there.
And those were some of the things I thought about while I sat out in my front yard on a summer evening.
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