I love Christmas Day. One of my favourite things of the whole year is to be outside in the quiet on Christmas Day. In the middle of a large city like Winnipeg, on Christmas Day there is a quiet hush. The stores are closed. No one is bustling to get anywhere…there may be some cars out to go to a church mass or to a family’s house, but no one is going to pick up dry cleaning, or rush out to get groceries, or is frantic to get to work. The city stops and all is closed. The downtown Y is open 364 days a year…it is closed on Christmas.
There were years that my favourite part of Christmas Day was that it was a day I could stop and rest, go for a walk, read a book, or sit silently by the fire–and not get farther behind. Nobody else was doing anything that day and so I knew that I wasn’t missing meetings or deadlines, or have people that were going to need me to do tomorrow what they had asked me to do that day.
Stillness is a rare commodity in our culture.
Slowness is a quality that is often belittled as laziness, or ineptness or incompetent.
I’m not so sure about that.
Slowness, I think is something to be admired and valued and treasured:
Don’t rush the hatch–
all that struggle gets you the strength to make it through life
Going faster gets you there slower,
worse off or not at all.
Sigh. The wisdom in that has me want to capture the slowing-down-ness of Christmas Day and bottle it…and distribute it to the world throughout the year.
I got a Nike fuel band in June to prompt me to walk more. I walked a lot this summer. Listened to stories or music on my iPhone sometimes. Walked often and walked long. Took life slower. Drank in the green of the grass, the colour of the flowers, the song of the birds, the flowing of the river.
And often I walked with a friend…with no agenda except to listen to stories that begged to be heard, and respond to his requests for my stories. No agenda except to laugh about the day’s events, the antics of Junior Tribe Members. No rush to get anywhere–it was wonderful. Indeed, there was not “anywhere” to get to.
No need for pretense or posturing. No need to get anywhere in the friendship…just a pleasant walk with pleasant conversation.
Just a slow, deep listen on quiet nights.
Turns out trust develops when you aren’t especially setting out to develop it…it just slowly evolves so slow a person doesn’t even notice…but it turns out that’s the sort of trust that is truly trustworthy.
It seems that getting to know another happens best when you aren’t trying to determine suitability, or trying to impress…but simply both want to enjoy a meaningful conversation on a quiet evening. And quietly, almost beyond awareness, love was born.
I’m learning that slow…taking it gentle as I please.
And it pleases me to be slower and gentler. I’m better off.
So much better off.
I’m gonna be a tortoise in 2015. Join me?
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