Whenever I can finish one of my assignments and feel good about the end result, it makes all the effort seem worthwhile. Today was one of those rare days when everything seemed to work the way I intended them to...the writing of the report was smooth, procedural and careful in terms of attention to detail (something I am not always good at) and making sure numbers and facts were consistently presented throughout the report. I hoped I would be finished by noon, and when I looked up from the keyboard and saw it was 11:45am, I was pleased but not really surprised.
Then after going to Five Guys again (because CK made me hungry talking about where she and her boys went for lunch after visiting the Knoxville Aquarium) and being relieved that this order took far less time to complete than Saturday's did, I came back and found some letters asking for advice that I could relate to better than some of my other recent attempts...it had been awhile since my writing came out effortlessly in a coherent structure and all I had to do was get it all down and see if everything made sense where I had initially placed them.
This clear seeing was with me the entire day. I read about the just announced winner (Shigeru Ban) of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture and recalled how his cardboard church in New Zealand seemed not only boldly creative in its use of readily available materials, but that the resulting space felt as spirit-filled as you would want a place of worship to feel. It truly says something about an artistic vision when the result transcends the materials used to create a meaningful space that anyone that can sense and feel intuitively...and in that intuitiveness there is no limit to what can be felt.
Even picking up my daughter at the Amtrak station in the afternoon was a task made memorable by the clearness of everything happening around me: trains pulling in, each heading for different destinations (Portland and Chicago), young children scampering along the tracks followed closely by parents making sure they didn't wander too far away, planes approaching the distant airport flying low enough overhead to see landing gear deploy and flaps lowered. Everything was normal and unassumingly 'usual'; most of the time we are barely aware of the life occurring around us...today though, I saw it all, almost as if heeding the lesson in Wilder's Our Town where if only for a moment we may be aware of the specialness of each and every moment of life, not just here or there.
This clarity extended itself to the latest music I downloaded today (seasons 1 and 2 of Person of Interest by Rawin Djawadi). At this point in my life I find myself drawn to music that is simple in structure but still touched by an element of 'space' that allows the listener's imagination to see not only what was intended but also opening up the mind to allow anything and everything to possibly connect with that setting.
The older I get, the more I find that I relate to music that depicts solitude, awareness...but also loneliness; colored by loss, perhaps regret, certainly acceptance of fate and with it the approach of death...one's own or that of someone else. For me, to live long enough to grow out of an understandable fear of death and have it replaced with the peace that comes from quietly accepting it as a natural part of life itself is to better understand the benevolence of God in granting us a finite time here before we continue our journey elsewhere.
It is expected to begin raining sometime overnight, and will continue for most of the week. I'm not sure if Tuesday or Wednesday will have anything close to the same clarity or easy tapping of resources that I experienced today, but realizing that awareness again is to be linked anew with so many special moments in my life, and that connective thread will not be easily lost in the days to come.
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