You just knew not to call her much before ten in the morning. Why? As she so eloquently put it: "I enjoy the delicious rhythm of my morning routine..."
In her case that featured turning on her music, savoring her two cups of coffee over her three newspapers, and carefully studying the birds who visited the several feeders placed strategically just outside her kitchen window.
When you think about it, isn't her little morning rhythm an attractive definition of our lives? Rhythms, there are always rhythms. Once established, we cherish them. Once lost, we almost perish without them. Some of the rhythms are obvious: The 9-5 of the regular workday...8-3 of the school day...sunrise-to-sunset of the newborns day....4-days-on-1-day-off for our first responder's day...sleep-in-the-morning-work-at-night for the actor's day. Each rhythm an almost sacred given for the participant. A rhythm that helps define their life.
There are others as well. The farmer's life is the rhythm of the seasons...the city dweller's is work-5-days-fun-in-the-weekend...then there's the 50 weeks a year waiting for those two weeks of vacation. Our modern electronic media have now added the incessant 24/7 rhythm of news-round-the-clock, compelling leaders and citizens alike to live faster and decide quicker.
To the Ancients and later in the Old Testament, the rhythm of human existence was often defined by the will and whim of angry gods. In the New Testament, there arrived the new rhythm of a loving god who calls us to be with him after life. By the time of the American Revolution, many of the Founding Fathers distilled the Biblical rhythm into the image of god as a great cosmic clock-maker, who set the world running for us to take over from there.
As Ecclesiastes declared: "There is a season for everything." A time to plant, a time to reap, a time to love, a time to die. How we catch the cadence of these rhythms is in the end a matter of personal choice. Our cosmologists explain how the rhythms have existed from the time time began. Our philosophers explain how we have been destined to either discover what they are, or on the other hand, to define what they are for ourselves.
Who's to say...? Probably each time-traveler for themself....! But before another cosmic minute ticks, could this be the appointed time....?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment