Living in the Moment--As a Child

“Let us spent one day as deliberately as nature and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing,” Thoreau says somewhere in Walden. I don’t know if I could spend a whole day as deliberately as nature—I imagine myself as a tree, for example, doing little more than rustling in the wind and engaging in photosynthesis—but Saturday morning I set out to live as deliberately as my two-year-old granddaughter, Corrie.
I took her to the College Rec Center and turned her loose. She spent a lot of time running about on the large gymnastics area in one corner of a room—a raised semi-soft surface for exercises and tumbles of all sorts. I sat on the surface and watched her, chased her, caught her and watched her some more. She was blissfully happy and, most of the time, in her own world. After about an hour (I know, if I were living as deliberately as a child, I would not have noticed how long we were there), we wandered into a racquet ball court where about 15 balls of various dimensions and bouncibility lay. Corrie played—again in her own world most of the time—and I wondered how old she would have to get before she would need to make some sort of structured game up with a ball or balls. At two-and-a-half she is content to throw and kick and run and talk to herself. She is not at all interested in my attempt to structure some kind of play.
Eventually it was time to go home for lunch so I put her boots on her feet, and then, after she had walked half way around the track in them, I lured her back to the coat hooks where we donned the rest of our winter clothes. On the ten minute walk between the Rec Center and the car (about 100 yards), she stopped to examine and stomp in several piles of snow and found a lovely piece of sand on the parking lot that she wanted to save.
The trick to enjoying this pace of life, I discovered, is to have nothing ahead of you that has to get done, no clock ticking, no agenda, no mental picture of a computer that you want to spend time with or a store that needs your custom. That’s not a state of mind achieved easily, especially after a life of more than fifty years of goal directed labor.
I can remember—quite clearly—what it was like to be a child with virtually no purpose on a summer day except my own delight however I might find that, to get up in the morning and head out for a ball diamond or a friend’s house, to ramble from one place to another, from one game or adventure or wild scheme or plotted mischief to another and the only interference to that lazy summer existence the three siren whistles—at noon, 6 PM and 9 PM.
But a lifetime of school attendance as a student and a teacher, over 60 years of responding like a Pavlovian dog to the next bell and the next class with its new set of students and learning goals to be accomplished, have shaped me into a person who is constantly measuring what he has to accomplish against the time he has to do it in, so that it has become harder and harder for me to live in the moment—as the theatre people say. To live deliberately. It is extremely difficult for me to give myself over totally to a conversation or a dinner or a beautiful scenic spot, “for at my back I always hear time’s wing`ed chariot hurrying near.” And there is the next thing to accomplish.
St. Paul said we must “redeem the time.” That sounds like an argument for the kind of life I’ve lived--always doing the next thing and the next thing and the next. Jesus said “take no thought for the morrow,” “consider the lilies,” “become like a child.”
Sometimes I wish I would have paid more attention to Jesus.
But maybe that’s what retirement’s for.