Have you ever packed a Powerpoint presentation tightly with eight-point bullet points? Fifty slides for 10 minutes ought to do. There's soooo much to say.
Or juggled phrases to wedge in as many keywords into every spare inch of your resume? I can cram in that scholarship award I won from IEEE if I cut those wasteful margins.
Experience eventually taught me those weren't memorable presentations. Nor a stand-out resume.
White space matters.
I just cancelled a nine-day silent meditation retreat. It was an opportunity to incline the mind to clear and the heart to open.
I am not happy about cancelling. My busyness is a symptom.
"At many points during our lives, we face a crossroads where we need to let a previous phase of life "die"", so says Carolyn Myss in Anatomy of the Spirit. I didn't realize it when I read that book during a broad (and dark) margin of my life known as post-dot-com-unemployment in 2001, that I'd be entering a winter.
Or maybe I did as reading the book was lightning-bolt-scary: "The crisis usually begins with an awareness of an absence of meaning and purpose that cannot be remedied merely by shuffling the external components of one's life. One feels a much deeper longing, one that cannot be satisfied by the prospect of a raise or promotion, marriage or new relationship. Ordinary solutions hold no attraction...Those who are in a spiritual crisis have a feeling that something is trying to wake up inside them."
Another season is upon me now. Maybe, Crossroads Dispatches was so apt on many levels. I find solace in reading one of my favorite passages from Walden:
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.
I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.
I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day."
This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. - Henry David Thoreau, Walden, from "Sounds "
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