Building

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

We passed this stone wall on our walk this morning, and it started me thinking …

Each day, my life is carefully built by a power far greater than little ‘me’. I truly have no idea exactly where or what this power is, but, when I’m attentive and mindful, I feel it all around and through me. It’s an infinitely gifted artist, this ‘stonemason’, and moment after moment, day after day, it meticulously places occurrences and situations in precisely the best arrangements so as to fashion graceful designs in my life. This artist is not some super-person in the sky, but simply the boundless force of the infinite, all-powerful present moment. The eternal present, the never-ending here and now, is the stonemason that scrupulously selects just the right stone for each placement. Some stones are sorrows, some are delights, some are tears, some are triumphs, but all are precisely where they should be, day by day, to build an elaborate and beautiful life called Hammy. I just need to pause more often to admire the work.

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One day, visiting my grandchildren at their house in the countryside, I started messing around with some small stones on one of the many stone walls on the property – just seeing what structure I could create in a few minutes. I had no design in mind, only the desire to do something spontaneous and set the stones wherever my hands wished them to be. If someone had asked me what I was building, I might have said “whatever my hands wish” – or maybe, like so many young people today, just “whatever”, perhaps with a suitable shrug. However, there would be no spirit of indifference or exasperation in my “whatever”, as there often seems to be when I hear the word spoken. If I said “whatever”, it would be because whatever I build with those small stones would be something special to me. I guess, in a way, I’m a whatever kind of guy. Whatever a day brings, I try to see what it has that can help me. I know that whatever happens a minute from now is the truth for that moment, and whatever thought I have at any moment helps me, somehow, be exactly who I’m supposed to be. It’s a good word for me. I’m more likely to smile than shrug when I say “whatever”.