Sunlight Drinking Moments
When was the last time you enjoyed a sun drinking moment? One of those moments where we feel no urgency to rush to the next thing. Where we can just feel the slight chill on our cheeks and our ears and watch the sun crest over the mountain, warming us and the valley surrounding us and embrace the starting of a new day.
Several years ago, before the pandemic shifted my work experiences pretty much completely virtual, I remember walking past a very respectable gentleman in a wheelchair sitting outside of the elder care facilitate along my way to catch my train for several months about this time of the year. Most mornings I’d find him turned to embrace the morning’s first feeble sunlight. He was there so consistently actually that he and I got in the habit of smiling and nodding as we passed, and he would be out there in a rain jacket if it was raining or with a blanket draped across his shoulders if it was a particularly chilly morning.
It’s made me reflect on my life situation: I can walk, I have a profession in which I feel fairly fulfilled and like I’m making some sort of a difference for society . . . But yet, somehow I doubt I get as much pure fulfillment out of these activities as that man seemed to get out of welcoming the sun in silent moments of the morning.
People often don’t make it past their stay at this elder care facility near my home. Many nights I wake up to ambulances’ silent flashing red and blue lights indicating that another experienced soul has passed on. Silent because there really is no urgency to rush the body to the mortuary. I wish there was a way of consistently drawing out the marrow of life’s experiences in the same way we are given to doing when we know those experiences are numbered.
I’ve been contemplating on endings and new beginnings more than usual these days because I’m trying to get in a place in my mind and heart where I’ll be able to embrace the idea of leaving the neighborhood I’ve been living in for the last decade. Nothing is finalized or anything, but I’m just getting my headspace ready to embrace that change. So I’ve thought about that last visit to the Oregon Coast, the last peruse through Powell’s Bookstore, the last saunter through the local Famer’s Market, the last massage and chiropractic appointment with the specialists who have kept me going for so many years, the last afternoon spent reading on my balcony among my many hydrangeas, the goodbyes to friends and coworkers and yes, even familiar passersby along the paths I’ve gotten into the routine of circumnavigating.
It’s made me care a bit less about life’s petty annoyances and the beautiful thing about having extra space in our mind and heart is we can focus more on the profound sun drinking moments. Those moments where we feel no urgency to rush to the next thing. Where we can just feel the slight chill on our cheeks and our ears and watch the sun crest over the mountain, warming us and the valley surrounding us.