There is heat. It’s at the end of the day. Sunday. A cold day, I have a cold. It’s all somehow fitting…My daughter in the park, me on the park bench. Watching the smooth arc of time divided minutely by an old mechanical watch, made before the days of chopping up the day into one-second ticks. Writing. An old Parker 51 fountain-pen onto decent paper in a bound journal. Thinking of pre-quartz time. Thinking of pre-ballpoint, PowerPoint, bullet-point time.
There are times when I wonder how advanced we’ve really been of late. I can cram eighty hours of music onto a device the size of my journal, but now I get annoyed when my daughter comes into my study to sing me a song. I can spend half my day justifying my productivity instead of just doing stuff. I can get anxious about global warming – but I seriously forgot how good the sun feels, working its warming way through a T-shirt and jumper on a winter’s day.
I told my daughter that we needed to go, now… but we don’t. Not really. How strange that I felt anxious because we were doing nothing much at all.
The sound of my daughter, drinking from a bubbler, stalling for time. The sound of rainbow lorikeets in the trees, hungrily making their enquiries. The smell of mud and old leaves. The feel of a cool breeze on my back.
Things I used to pay attention to, thirty years ago. Things that I need to remember to stop for now – so she can notice them too.
There is heat. It’s the last of the day.
And my Lord allowed me to notice it.
Alleluia
