Did you see it? From our vantage point after one of the recent rains, a vivid rainbow of bright purple, green, yellow, and red seemingly rose from the stretch of Hickory Creek behind our house. Its colors reflected in the water.
There are rainbows and then there are rainbows. We’ve all seen them and pointed them out. But with time, we usually forget.
When we first caught a glimpse of this beauty through our back door, we immediately stepped to the porch to see better. It arced high into the heavens and seemingly came to rest at the end of Hickory Creek. Literally from where we stood, we could see both ends of this rainbow. And, a second fainter rainbow shadowed the more brilliant one. Although the main one appeared close enough to touch, we couldn’t see a pot of gold at either end. But we remembered the Biblical promise of the rainbow.
We stood and marveled at the sight until these rainbows eventually faded away as rainbows are wont to do. But that spectacular image is now etched in our minds and memories. Not only because we saw the unique rainbows but also because we stopped to observe, we will long remember.
So much of life is like these rainbows. Many events, some minor, some monumental, come and go daily. Many we can’t forget; some are too painful to ignore. But much passes us by without our even noticing. We’re just too busy to step aside and record everything.
Lori Erickson, in the new February issue of Family Circle, made these observations as she attempted to engage in random acts of kindness, “I discovered some things I hadn’t considered before. The first was that I had to slow down in order to find ways to be useful. Liberated from the muffled world of my own thoughts and more mindful the world around me, I found myself looking more intently at the people I passed on the street and noticing things I’d previously missed. Just as you can’t you can’t truly appreciate the beauty of the countryside while driving by at 70 miles per hour, you also can’t fully relate to the people around you when you’re constantly busy.”
Being too busy is an age old problem. However, with the push to multitask and to be a slave to all of the marvelous technology - cell phones, pagers, Internet, Blackberries, and whatever else new will pop-up in the next six months - each designed to make life easier, but in reality demanding more of our time, the state of busyness has risen to a whole new level. More than ever, we must consciously remind ourselves to be polite and refrain from using our noisy tools around others, to ignore the constant din around us and to avoid taking work, both physically and mentally, home.
However to appreciate life, we must do more than just slow down. We’re all good at looking. We can scan a newspaper or glimpse at someone different or stare at a movie or fix our eyes on an object to keep our balance. But when we look, do we really see?
From time to time, we ask for a sign, a direction. And when we search, we usually find that sign. However more often than not, the sign we asked for has been there all along. The difference lies in the fact that we have finally acknowledged our need and have at last sought out guidance. The sign hasn’t changed; we have.
I love the story that Helen Keller writes. Whenever she was with friends, she would ask them, without looking, to tell her the color of their spouses’ eyes. More times than not, they couldn’t. How is it that we don’t know every detail of a face we see daily? Do we look, but not see?
Prompted by Keller’s story, one of my favorite assignments directed students to write a description of a face that they knew that they would see within the next 24 hours. They should write so that I would be able to read the written descriptions and recognize the people should I encounter them. For homework, I then asked them to study the face they wrote about. The next day, I asked them to relate their discoveries.
Most spoke of a scar or the slant of a smile that they had overlooked. However, if the student said that he had described the face exactly, I knew he had not done his homework for the face changes daily. If you doubt it, explain how a picture of a person made one year looks so different from one made the next, regardless of age. Such change doesn’t come overnight; it is gradual and subtle.
Perhaps author Thornton Wilder says it best. “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
And therein may lie the true pot of gold.
2008
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