Occurrences

There is a regular occurrence of nothing everyday. They are the individual moments, the ones wrapped in between. But like everything else, it seems they are kneaded into our lives for our salvation. Every moment we have to do something, something that we ourselves choose to do, is a moment that we can choose to make meaningful. What we call boredom is essentially a great gift. For the first time in history, we live in a country where many people have a regular experience of this boredom. It is essentially an excess of time we have to do whatever we wish with it.

We tend to not do much with it. I recall one of my favorite authors, John Green, stating that we actually use to escape what he calls "the pain of existence." In a small way, every moment we are bored is like exiting the mother's womb once more and entering into a world that's cold and noisy.

The difference is that with boredom, we don't exit something as much as we enter into something. It is the inner life that is cold because we have not filled it with the warmth of love, it is noisy because we have not quieted our minds and our natural desires have not been tamed, let alone our distorted passions. And so we sit in the noisy cold of our own existence, restless and looking for something to fill that time because we are also too numb to grasp the weight of what is occurring within us.

But every single one of these moments is an occurrence, a time to confront the cold and noisy self. We are weak at first, which is why from our youth we have been filled with times of imagination and games; we were given a spark of divine creativity to wrestle with. But as we grew older, we mistook maturity for coldness, and play for noise. We slowly grew colder, drowning more of ourselves in that noise. And sadly our youth is doing this now, sitting in front of screens and documenting every moment online for global scrutiny. Not children terrorize each other online, they have depression, as young as nine they are committing suicide.

The occurrences crop up again and again, calling you to confront yourself, to carve out a place for God within yourself, to learn the beauty of simply being without expectation. For some, it is simply to sit and be still. For others, it is to draw and yet for others, it is to garden. In the minutes and seconds throughout the day, it may be to doodle, to say a small prayer, to be internally silent for a few seconds. Whatever it is, it is the work of salvation.