The Art of Everyday Life
My musings today are inspired by a passage from Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy by Sarah Ban Breathnach, where she explores three habits of living.
If you are anything like me, you are probably very well-versed in two of these habits, having practiced them all your life. I’m referring to the habit of doing and the habit of brooding. I’m imagining perhaps you nodding right now in resonance? After all, we are creatures of habit!
For most of us, the habit of doing develops first. As children we quickly learn to secure attention, care, and affirmation by doing stuff (ideally stuff our caretakers approve of). And that habit is honed in and refined through our adulthood as we come to implicitly equate “living” with “doing.” As we move through life, sooner or later we encounter the twin to the habit of doing, the habit of brooding. As we go about our doing, we start to project onto the future, dwell on the past, endlessly ruminate about what we did or did not do, anticipate, worry, compare, regret, second-guess. Oof! I’m exhausted just thinking about it!
And then, the habit of brooding starts to drive the habit of doing. Rooted in the past or the future, these twin habits conspire to rob us of the present.
At a certain point in our lives, by choice or by necessity, we might discover the habit of being, the simple exaltation of the present moment. We become what Sarah Ban Breathnach terms “curators of our own contentment,” when we become intentional cultivators of the habit of being, a heightened awareness of the present moment, where abundance lives. “The habit of being is a grateful appreciation of the good surrounding us, no matter what our circumstance might be today. What if you knew there was always going to be a simple pleasure to look forward to every few hours? What if you made sure there was? How do you think you would greet the day?” (Sarah Ban Breathnach).
In celebration of cultivating the habit of being, I want to share a poem that speaks about what might be a fourth habit we could cultivate: the habit of listening. Listening to the wind ruffling the leaves. Listening to the gentle waves crashing on the shore; listening to the distant call of a red cardinal; listening to you; listening to myself. Listening to the stillness of this moment. Listening to whatever is present is a powerful way of grounding ourselves in the moment; and grounding ourselves in the moment is a powerful way of practicing the habit of being. Together, these twin habits might conspire to bring more serenity and contentment into our lives.
I Want to Listen
by Roseverry Whatola Trommer
I want to listen to you the way rabbit brush
responds to sunlight, transformed
by warmth into earthy perfume.
I want to let your words land on me
like milkweed seeds, like yellow leaves,
like the orange petals of blanket flower,
want to receive them as gently
as they are offered.
I want to let your words sprinkle on me
like soft desert rain on the sandstone
so that I know where each drop has landed
until at least all of me is shining.
Sometimes, so caught in my current
of thoughts, I miss what you say,
you with your hushed and tender way.
I want to listen to the words
behind your words
the way I hear the river
inside what first seems to be silence—
and then it is all I hear.
I want to meet your words
and not lose my own words—
want to hear their evolving duet,
this song we write together
with every conversation,
every silence.
