Breathing the Air

I know I must have written about this before, because this isn’t the first time I’ve caught myself doing this–but I’m noticing that it’s one of those times where I’ve been so bogged down in my day-to-day activities that I have to purposely come up for air. To stop and take an inventory of what is around me.

Perhaps we all do this from time to time: get ourselves in a rut where we stop paying attention, sort of running on cruise control. Some have a greater sphere of awareness than others, and can stop and smell the roses more frequently. For me, if I’m not careful, my own sphere will get smaller and smaller until I have tunnel vision. Sometimes I can just sort of catch myself, and then stop and breathe the air. Other times, it takes a wake-up call. This time, it’s been sort of both.

This morning in the coffee shop, for some reason, I’ve been part of several conversations going on, more so than usual–enough to make me realize that I’ve been missing this dynamic. I generally come to the coffee shop to work on my freelance writing assignments, and it’s just so easy for me to get in a zone where I don’t realize who is coming in and going out–and these are people I know and see almost every day as a regular here. That’s the “catching myself” part. Then there’s the other part where I think sitting here sedentary for hours at a time is starting to affect me in some physical ways, and that I need to start being more active and be more healthy. That’s the wake-up call part. (Relax–I don’t have chest pains or anything.)

Breathing is an interesting thing. It’s an automatic reflex set up by our brain that we don’t even think about the vast majority of the time. We breathe in and out, pretty much on auto-pilot. But something interesting happens when we stop whatever we are doing and start breathing the air on purpose. We look up, we look around, and we start noticing little things around us that have always been there, but we didn’t notice before because we were too busy. We notice what a pretty day it is, or that there are flowers in that flower bed we didn’t realize were there (geesh, I sound like a hippie), or that there’s someone we know over there that we didn’t even say hi to. Breathing the air on purpose makes us break the rut–and we all need that sometimes.

Rambling again…but I guess what I’m saying is I am realizing that I’ve been breathing the air on autopilot for a long time, far too long. And that’s a shame, because I live in a place that’s surrounded by natural beauty that I’ve been barely noticing lately. We moved here to surround ourselves with this beauty, and that’s opportunity being wasted. Pity.

A huge theme in our lives as a family over the past several years has been to learn to see and hear God in the everyday, not just in activities we typically deem as “spiritual.” If I believe that, then I have to believe He is to be experienced even in the little things. To me, that means that if my tunnel vision has gotten this bad, I am actually limiting myself in my ability to hear Him. How much is He speaking to me in my everyday surroundings that I’m just not noticing?

I sound like a hippie again–albeit a Christian hippie. Anyhow. You get the point.

So off I go to breathe the air. You might try it, too. 🙂