Why, I wondered, do we think it important not to be the last? In this particular case little Ollie (as I discovered his name to be) was doing his own thing and that included not keeping up. I rather liked the look of Ollie - maybe that is why I asked myself the question. But I think too of my friends in L'Arche. Many of them tend to be the last or somewhere near and many of them are among the most interesting and caring people I know - perhaps because they are not so focused on keeping up?
That's all.
The other thought about little random things that are part of the journey also happened this morning. Across the street where the construction site is there was, suddenly, a lot of activity. This activity included several fire engines, a couple of police cruisers, yellow tape around the whole block - not just the construction site. No ambulance so presumably it wasn't someone who was hurt. But it was most certainly an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence and gained, needless to say a lot of attention.
So it made me think of that very phrase about things that are 'out-of-the-ordinary'. These are things that are not what we expect, they may be a bit mysterious because we don't understand what is happening, they may be a bit shocking but it seems that the important thing is, we notice them because they are unexpected, different. Which implies a sense that we all have of 'the ordinary' which mostly fills our day and is, for the most part, the stuff of our time on earth.
I wondered: if we paid more attention to 'the ordinary', would we start to see in it too, more things that are extraordinary, out of the ordinary? I am going to try to look more carefully from now on.
1 comment:
I think your two thoughts are related. If we aren't in such a hurry, we might have time to notice more of the "ordinary". Time is such a complicated concept and can mean different things to different people. We only have a finite amount of it, at least in this life, and so one reaction to that might be to hurry so as to try to pack as much in as possible. But I don't think it works that way. If by hurrying we miss out on noticing and appreciating the ordinary things going on around us, then we have actually squandered some of our time rather than gained more of it.
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