I was sitting on our back patio a few hours ago, during those last few minutes of the day when the light is golden and you can see little insects flying in the sunshine in their small clouds.
It reminded me on sitting on the back patio at my auntie's summerhouse when I was a kid, when she and I would just sit and see towards the sunset.
I spent many summers there when my parents were traveling and I always enjoyed the stillness of the place and the peace and quiet of being with somebody who was — in retrospect — almost certainly as strangely introverted as I was and who just enjoyed the ability to sit and do absolutely nothing while at the same time taking in everything that was happening around us.
As I have written about in the past, in some ways she was the one who taught me the whole idea behind meditation, or at least her version of sitting quietly and letting your mind go still. A life without rushing and excessive noise and chaos was what she strived for.
I know she always worried about my mental well-being, given my parents' eternal travel and moving around from place to place, which I think is why she so often volunteered to look after me when they were out and about. As she confessed to me at some much later point in life (when I was perhaps in my mid 20s) she shared that she "worried that my soul would not be able to catch up with my body as much as we were moving about.
That was a conversation that took place some 40 years ago but I still remember it quite well, and in a sense it has helped given me a bit of an anchor in life just like sitting on that back patio offered me an anchor of sorts because I knew it was always the same and I was sitting in a wicker garden chair on those bricks where my family had been sitting, looking at sunsets, since the late 1930s.
I am blessed that I can still go back to that place which has now been passed along into a sort of community family summer house shared by all the cousins (I'm one of the cousins!) where we each get a few weeks a year there.
In recent years my only limitation on enjoying those moments has been the fact that we can seldom afford to go because... well, packing everything up, getting a house sitter and cat sitter, paying for the airfare and food and rental car over there, shutting down our businesses and so forth is not exactly a cheap proposition.
Even so, it does give me an anchor point of sorts just to know that it exists, and that we have the possibility of going should the opportunity present itself.
I'm not sure when that opportunity actually will present itself again, but I hope it is going to be sooner rather than later before my weary bones get too old to comfortably sit my way through a 9-hour transatlantic flight. Some things definitely don't get easier with age!
I expect many people would rebel or be turned off at the thought of something being an "anchor point" in their life since what is often viewed as having value is constantly being on the move and constantly trying new things. Humans get bored after about 30 seconds, it seems.
I suppose it's testament to my weirdness that I have never really sought out novelty, and the whole idea of "adventure" has never been particularly appealing. That's not to say that I haven't stepped out of my comfort zone regularly, but the outcome has invariably been that at the end of whatever we were undertaking that it wasn't actually worth the effort.
I think the idea of stepping outside your comfort zone is a great one, and I can appreciate how it may stretch our reality threshold but on the other hand I don't believe in doing it unless we end up otherwise looking back and saying wow, that was really worthwhile!
Otherwise, what's the point of doing something; anything?
Thanks for stopping by and have a great Friday!
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