May all that has been reduced to noise in you, become music again. Author Unk.
I walked into the classroom at the start of winter session following the school’s holiday break. It must have been about 1961 or 2. I don’t recall precisely. At that time of life, one doesn’t make notes for future reference; said notes are safely tucked away somewhere in the folds and recesses of the brain. Who knows why or when a stray memory will break the surface of the seas that pound the rocky shores of the mind’s gray harbor, but they will.
I stepped into my classroom at Whittier Elementary School in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, and having taken my seat I looked up, and lo, there behind the teacher was a blackboard. But it wasn’t black; it was green. While we kids were out making merry during the ten or twelve day holiday recess, contractors were busy removing all the old, dusty, cracked, and worn blackboards, replacing them with boards of pure, clean, and unsullied slate. There before us was a green slate, a clean slate.
New things are exciting. New things are amazing. Whether it is meeting new people who may delight us in eventually becoming best friends, or new tools that help us accomplish our goals faster and easier than before, or new ideas that expand our minds in ways we’d never thought possible, new things bring with them new hopes, new dreams, and new realities. The green boards (which we continued calling “blackboards”) were an outward and visible sign that it was no longer 1908 within the rooms of Whittier Elementary; we’d become a part of the Space Age!
I have no idea what 2022 will bring. I do know that each of us alone, and all of us together will face a wide variety of challenges. We may turn the page on the calendar, but there are still issues that have hitched themselves to our giddy-ups. We continue to slog our way through a never-ending pandemic, societal unrest, political shenanigans, and a string of catastrophic weather events. Those could easily lead us to wallow in the pond of despond or sink into the swamp of sadness. On the other hand …
Yes, the world turns, and there is really no getting away from it – in some ways. But there are things we can do to improve life as we know and experience it. The first thing we can do is identify the noise we’re hearing and deal with it. Married couples who take off on their honeymoon with clattering cans tied to their bumpers (is that still a thing?) may either continue to drive away, hoping those galloping tins will eventually fall off, or they can pull over and take a few moments to cut the cords and leave the Symphony of the Cacophony behind.
We can do the same with our lives. The key, for me, has always been to slow down, take a breath, and settle. My monkey brain doesn’t want to settle, but even when the monkey is off my back, I find the circus is still in town, so I need to find ways to unplug the calliope (and that ain’t easy).
I’ve mentioned before that a sigh is a body’s reset button. It is just enough of a pause that the body and brain stop what they’re doing for just a moment to try to figure out what’s happening. It’s like the maestra beating on the podium with her baton whilst giving the orchestra a cease and desist order, waving her hands and yelling, “No, no, no. That’s not right!” during rehearsal. Everyone stops what they’re doing; they look up from their music sheets and their instruments and focus on the One who invites them to stop playing the notes and start playing the music, to find the beat and become one with the rhythm.
There is nothing magical about turning a page on the calendar. The magic begins when we stop making noise, when we listen for the beat, and when we focus on our heavenly Maestra, whose only goal is for us to get it together. May God grant us a clean slate, fresh chalk, and a harmonious life here in this, our (monkey-filled) valley.
Keith Axberg writes on matters concerning life and faith. Author of newly released: Who the Blazes is Jesus? Good News for a Vulgar World (available through Amazon in Print and e-book)
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