Surprises

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

1.

            It is awe-inspiring to me how many surprises exist in my life – how many unforeseen thoughts, feelings, and events continuously occur. It’s like I’m a small stream in an endless ocean of surprises. Who knows what will happen in the next few hours, or even the next few seconds – what current of life will come and carry me along, what thoughts will waft me here and there, what bolts-from-the-blue will suddenly show themselves? The verb “to surprise” originally meant, in Latin, “to seize”, and it does sometimes seem like I’m seized, moment by moment, by one startling surprise after another. True, I don’t often think about this aspect of life – this tendency of life to be reborn and brand-new each moment – but it’s there, nonetheless. Each second, the shoreless ocean of my life shifts, a little or a lot, and a new and splendid surprise appears. 

2.

Today, on a walk in the Denison Pequotsepos Preserve, we came upon this surprise – some enormous stones piled perfectly together.

Of course, we pass beautiful stone walls almost every day, but, for some reason, this one caught me by surprise, and it caused me to feel, once again, absolute astonishment that human beings, probably more than 100 years ago, were somehow able to lift stones this large and set them in place. We stood in silence for a few moments and just studied it in awe and appreciation.