Shelling Peas

Yesterday was a long, slow day--one of those days that seems to go on forever, when one looks at the clock, thinking, "It's probably 5:00 by now!"...yet it's only 2. It was one of those kinds of days.

Those rarely happen anymore. It got me to thinking about what life used to be for adults before this new age happened--back when my grandma was alive. I can remember hanging out on the front porch of my Grandma Helen's country home and shelling peas, or sorting apricots that were picked from the tree out back and the afternoons seemed to lazily wind on and on. We sat out there for hours, my grandma sipping iced tea, and chatted about the weather, about the wheat crop, about the horses.

Grandma Helen lived way out in the country and we had to traverse dirt roads for miles to get to her house. Grandpa's health was failing most of my childhood years until his death when I was in high school; I only have one memory of him walking and that was when I was about 3 or 4 years old and I rode with him in the pickup down a country road, while one of his thoroughbreds ran beside us. Grandpa loved the race track and he and Grandma often had a horse they were training. During the summers, they would head off for Denver where they rented a bungalow and spent their days on the track. For our family vacations, we joined them for a week or so and I spent my afternoons walking the aisles of the barns and checking out the various horses behind stall doors.

Those were fun days.

People knew how to be present back then. They knew how to sit with their thoughts and let them brew for a bit rather than stuffing them down via email or texting or games on smart phones.

People knew how to be quiet.

Savana introduced me to a YouTube video recently called From the Amazon to the Garden State. It's about a man who researched the people of the Amazon and so he lived with them for awhile in order to really get a grasp on their culture. These people are far removed from our modern day ways as they live off the land and their lives are ones of simplicity and tradition. Anyway, this man fell in love with a girl from the Amazon and brought her home to New Jersey where together they had 3 children. I won't ruin the story in case anyone wants to watch this YouTube video. It's fascinating and thought provoking...but the one statement I took from the video is when this Amazon girl comes to America and notes how people pass strangers in the street with no acknowledgement, how people run to and fro, constantly busy...and she said, "People weren't made to live this way."

I have often wondered about that actually. It seems our lives are artificial: artificial air as we live in manufactured heat or manufactured cold; artificial light; artificial houses built of brick. And yet, knowledge has expanded greatly with our artificial lives.

I am not complaining. I'm happy with air conditioning and a comfortable home that keeps me safe from the elements. I love driving to see my parents and arriving in a matter of hours though they are hundreds of miles away. Our modern conveniences make life grand in many respects. But sometimes I wonder if we've lost our ability to enjoy life because we spend so much time filling it.

And so yesterday as I hung in my living room and the hours seemed to be passing slowly by, my first thought was, What should I do? I need to fill this time with something...

And that stopped me in my tracks.

I changed course and decided not to fill my time but, rather, to just sit with it for awhile, to be quiet for a minute, to just be.

And it made me wonder, did people's lives of yesteryear seem to last longer? Maybe their years were shorter in number, but longer in quality, in time well-spent.

Maybe their days were filled with moments lived rather than moments squandered.

Maybe I need to -
 ...put down my phone and look up.

Maybe I need to shell more peas on the front porch and talk about the weather.