Finding Time

In a busy multi-faceted life I find I am always saying I "couldn't find time" for this or that. Too often the "this or that" is something small that might enrich my life. I subscribe to Composer's Datebook, a short daily story about a composer, that comes in my email inbox from American Public Radio. (http://composersdatebook.publicradio.org/)  I can read it then and there, go to the website where I can not only read it but hear samples of the music, or download it to listen to later. I have been subscribing to this daily post for over a year. But I find that I am just saving and saving them without ever "getting around" to listening to them or even reading them. I have also discovered a wonderful website, that allows me to click on a particular spiritual practice ("awareness" for example) and to read snippets about it, to find books and movies and music and quotations about it. (www.spiritualityandpractice.com/ ) Theoretically it would take less than 15 minutes to look through and read and listen slowly and carefully, and come away with an insight for the new day. But I don't take that time. I tell my students that even on a busy day they can find 10 minutes to play scales or play through one of their assigned pieces four or five times. Progress in so many things is achieved in small increments. But I do not always practice what I preach.

We live in a sped-up world full of more distractions than ever. We have replaced hours and hours of work with labor-saving devices. But in their stead we have given ourselves enormous amounts of information to process and produce via email, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs. I know my main reason for ignoring composer's datebook and spiritual practice is that I am overwhelmed when I open my email inbox. Just reading through everything can take over an hour. In a busy day I wind up practicing what I call "email triage", opening only those messages that urgently require a response. I delete what I can without reading it and leave the rest in my inbox to await processing when I "have more time". As the un-opened messages accumulate I feel more and more ill-at-ease, worried about what I might be missing, worried that I will fail to respond to a friend in a timely way and cause hurt feelings. I feel overwhelmed by the virtual mailbox on top of the snail mailbox, the papers on my desk, the virtual photos and videos that are trapped in my camera waiting to be uploaded, named, sorted, printed and distributed. I have stacks of books waiting to be read, papers that need processing and filing. It seems that the virtual world has not saved us time but only doubled the number of things we must sort through, read and respond to. It can be exhausting.

It never feels good to leave things undone, to allow papers to accumulate. But if I am to "find" time for walks, to listen to music, to read something enlightening, to practice my spiritual traditions, to play with the dog or respond to a family member or friend with full presence then I must let other things go. The multiplicity of demands on our time challenge us to practice discernment, self-discipline and mindfulness. They are an invitation to choose wisely when we decide how to spend the next hour, to do those things we know to be beneficial especially when they require effort, to learn not to rush but to be fully focused on whatever we are doing while we are doing it. It isn't easy to let things go. But we are not omnipotent and our time on Earth is limited. Virtual reality must not replace actual reality, and life is more than crossing things off the to do list. There must be space for physical engagement with each other and with the world. It is all the praying, walking and talking, hand-holding, music-making, out-loud laughing, flower-smelling, bread baking, ball catching moments alone and together that make life worth while.

Beauty in Diversity

My 13-year-old daughter asked me the other day whether she should pluck her eyebrows. Apparently a girl at school informed her that her eyebrows were too misshapen! She has a pretty solid sense of herself, so her first reaction was, "Why would I want to pluck my eyebrows? How ridiculous!" She thought plucking eyebrows was some weird fad that her seventh grade classmates had invented. I told her, no, women have been tweezing and bleaching and tweaking and picking on themselves for centuries. This led to a wonderful discussion of all the pressures on women to look a certain way. We talked about how commercials purposely set up women (and all of us) to feel bad or anxious about something and then try to convince us that the only cure/solution is to buy whatever product they are pushing. We talked about how women are literally chopped to pieces in print ads. How many times can you find a cropped picture of a woman's body part--a leg, a curvy hip, a hand--which does not include the rest of her body or at least her face! We talked about plastic surgery and the trend toward younger and younger recipients.

I thought about all those thousands of girls and women spending however many thousands of dollars trying to look the same--the same Pippa butt, the same Angelina Jolie plumped lip, the same Barbie figure. I thought about how sad it is that women can't see their own unique beauty. Then, as so often happens with me, I thought about music.

There have been tens of thousands of beautiful pieces of music written over the last three hundred years. Each is made up of the same elements: long and short notes, notes that step or skip, melody, harmony. Yet each is unique in its beauty, in the shape of its phrases. We are like that. Though we are created from the same template, though we each have a mouth and a nose and a chin, none of us looks exactly like anyone else. We are beautiful because we are unique. How we gaze into a child's face eagerly looking for dad's nose or mom's eyes! How we marvel at the way the child reflects both parents' faces, combining them somehow into a unique shape. How sad it is that so many women cannot see the beauty in their uniqueness and the uniqueness of their own particular beauty. It is that very diversity that makes us lovely.