On Learning How to Be

It was Saturday, the last day of November. The next day would be the start of Advent, that season of penance which, in the words of my favorite spiritual guide, is meant “to get you better fit for what’s to come, by cleaning you and trimming you and training you.”

Winter had arrived suddenly, like an unwelcome in-law, dropping nearly a foot of snow. It was difficult to see the lines on the highway as I drove toward town.

This was not what I had planned for the day. I had emails to respond to and documents to prepare. But I found myself diverted, to help a snowbound friend whose car was stuck in her driveway.

I had volunteered to help, but I was rebelling. I had so much else to do!

And then I saw this sign. The complete message used to read “Be alert. Deer on highway.” I don’t know why, but for several days it had been conveying this truncated, existential message. That morning, it gave me pause.

Simply be. That brought to mind the words of author Eckhard Tolle, whose focus is on the meaning of being, and especially of being in the moment.

“Whatever the present moment contains,” he wrote, “accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.”

Maybe I sighed. Anyway, I drove on in a new frame of mind towards Superfoods, to do what my friend had scheduled for that time. I put on the apron and began to greet people coming in the door, to thank those who slipped something into the slot in the bucket and then to ring the little red bell.

Perhaps echoing the next word that was missing from that electronic highway sign, I felt unusually alert.

Neighbors stamped snow off their boots and opened heavy scarves as they passed my stool. There was lots of chatter with the cashiers.

All roads east and southbound, I heard, had been closed by snow on this morning two days after Thanksgiving. Not only was my friend snowbound in her own home; some people who had come to visit our town for the weekend were now trapped here, and kept away from theirs.

There were various responses to this predicament. I overheard one young man who came to visit his parents, and would now have to miss something important back at work. I wished he could have seen that sign. “Worry pretends to be necessary,” Tolle has written, “but serves no useful purpose.”

Someone else inquired how to get a permit to cut a Christmas tree in the forest. “You’ve come all the way from Casper to get a Christmas tree?” I asked, and then realized: Being trapped, he’d decided to make the best of it. I wished him a tree full of good memories.

That day I never did get to those other things I had meant to do. Instead, we tried to dig my friend’s car out of the snow. The drifts were soft as powdered sugar; the snow sparkled as I tossed it off the shovel. Our effort was doomed to failure; her car spun endlessly on a patch of ice concealed by the white.

As the light waned into evening, we made room for her in our own back seat and drove off toward town to enjoy the Christmas concert by songwriter Skip Ewing. Skip and his wife Linda made Dubois their home town last year. Once again, he had decided to welcome the season in our company, among his new friends.

As he introduced his songs, Skip sometimes bragged about the famous people who had recorded them or the famous places they had been performed. He’s so likeable that we are willing to overlook this, because he surely knows his way around a guitar, and something about his manner makes us feel like neighbors rather than an audience. If anything could make me live in the moment that evening, it was his unspoken invitation to add our own voices to his in singing “Silent Night.”

Welcome, Advent. The snow has returned, and with it the long quiet evenings in my home several miles outside a remote small town in Wyoming. As the frantic holiday season approaches, I can mentally rebel against these realities of winter. Or (constitutionally A-type ex-urbanite that I am) I can use them as reminders that there are realities more important than my constant busy-ness.

Like the snow, I can drift sometimes. Perhaps exactly when I feel I have too much to do, I will remember to emulate the brilliant stars in the dark sky outside, and simply be.

© Lois Wingerson, 2019

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