I LIVE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, a land of forests and deserts and mountains and rivers.  It is hemmed in all one side by the Pacific Ocean, most the other side by the granite and glaciers of the Rocky mountains, and held together by a patchwork of lakes, some tiny and icy and bluegreen, others huge and dark and warm like a kiss.  British Columbia was the wilderness that old gold prospectors, Yukon-bound, had to ply their way across in search of Aladdin’s cave, surviving by hardiness and foolhardiness, by wiliness and stubbornness, holding on by the skin of their teeth.  But some found gold right here, in this province, in pockets where swift rivers spilled out of mountains, clawing away at rock and mineral on its way down, then strewing its plunder through valleys where the water slowed and bent. 

My wife’s grandmother Alice used to live in a place like that.  And in her middle years, in the late part of the last century, men with lingering gold fever still went there to try to dredge up what they could from river silt, or to bore deep into the hills, propping the earth as they went with a rickety skeleton of rough-hewn timbers that almost always, at some twist in the tunnel, gave way.

One day Grandma Alice struck gold.  She was in her own back yard, polishing a stone.  It was a large boulder, too big to move, that sat athwart her garden.  It was one of those stones round and smooth, tumbled by aeons of wind and ice and water, thickly embedded with glittery chunks of mineral.  She was polishing it with sandpaper.  Her logic was that, since she couldn’t be rid of the thing, she may as well beautify it, try to remove the scumble of dullness on its surface and hone it to a lustrous sheen.  She was going to make it the centrepiece of her garden.

But she got more than that.  As she sanded, she noticed a thin sifting of gold gathering on the stone.  She pressed the moist tip of her finger into it, and pulled up a caking of gold dust.  Her heart raced.  She sanded faster, leaning her whole body into it, and more gold appeared.  Now she was scrubbing that rock like a bloodstain, strong sweeping strokes, bone and muscle bent into its hardness, forcing it to yield.  Gold accumulated rapidly. 

She caught the virus in one swoop, understood with perfect instinct what all this time she’d dismissed as sheer foolishness: grown men squandering all else - homes and farms and families and reputations - and flinging themselves headlong into reckless adventures, spending their years burrowing beneath tree roots, grubbing through silt beds.

But now she had it too: gold fever.  She was going to be rich.

She stopped a moment, to wipe her brow, to rest a spell.  And that’s when she noticed: something was wrong with her wedding ring.  The topside was normal, but the underside, the part that nestled in the crease where her finger joined her palm, wasn’t.  The band there was thin as a cheese cutter’s wire, thin as a filament.

She had nearly sanded her wedding ring clean off.  All that gold was merely filings.  It was the remnants of her heirloom, treasure reduced to dust. 

It was all fool’s gold.

I LAUGHED THE FIRST TIME MY WIFE TOLD ME THAT STORY, but only the first time.  After that it made me sad.  It’s sad for its own sake, an aging woman once more giddy as a school girl, heady with a sense of windfall, dreaming a new dress and a real holiday, and the next moment crestfallen, stinging with shame over her coveting and naiveté.

But it’s also sad because much of my own life I’ve repeated, again and again, Grandma Alice’s mistake.  I’ve squandered treasures in pursuit of dust.  I’ve eroded precious, irreplaceable things in my efforts to extract something that’s not actually there.  I’ve imagined I was on the tail of a groundbreaking discovery, only to find I’m at the tail end of a hard loss.  Here’s a few: all the times I never swam in a cool lake with my children, or made a snowman or baked sugar cookies with them, or lingered in bed with my wife on a Saturday morning, or visited the sick, because I was in a hurry to – well, that’s just it: I don’t remember why.  I was just in a hurry.

I’ve been in a hurry most my life.  Always rushing to get from where I am to where I’m going.  Always cocking my arm to check my watch, doing that habitually, mechanically, mindlessly.  Always leaning heavy on the gas, in the passing lane, angry that the driver in front of me doesn’t share my sense of urgency, that she’s in no particular hurry and can’t seem to imagine a world where anybody would be.  Always fuming over having to wait in bank line-ups and grocery checkouts and road construction zones.

Sanding away my wedding band.

Here’s the thing: all the hurry has got me no further ahead.  It’s actually set me back.  It’s diminished me.  My efforts to gain time have only lost it.  There are whole epochs of my existence that have swept by me in a blur, with nary a cheap souvenir to remember them by.  There are seasons and seasons of my life swallowed whole, buried in a black hole of forgetting. 

I keep waking up, finding myself older, my children altered dramatically, the paint I just put on the side of the house a season or two ago already blistered and flaking.  I can’t remember getting here.  My wife turned to me one evening not long ago, spoke a name.  At first I was uncomprehending.  The name was like a lost word, archaic, arcane, a word I used to bandy freely but now whose meaning I could not dredge up or pry open.  Then I remembered: the name belonged to someone I once knew well – or thought I did.  I had lost touch with them several years past.  Until Cheryl mentioned them, I had forgotten them entirely.  Now, I recalled them only in hazy silhouette, in rough fragments.  The name was a smudge of memory.  I couldn’t remember the texture of their voice, or the shape of their face, or any of the conversations we’d had.  I couldn’t remember their middle name, or if they had one.  I couldn’t remember what secrets I entrusted to them, or they to me.  I couldn’t remember where they were born, or who their parents were, or what happened that we no longer knew the other’s whereabouts. These were all things I am quite sure I used to know. 

Only, I must not have been fully present at the time I learned them.  I was probably in a hurry, already pressing hard and anxious toward elsewhere, lacking patience to seal up what I’d gathered.  A large chunk of my life disappeared, without a trace.

Someone asked me recently what my biggest regret in life is.  I though a moment, surveying the vast landscape of my blunders and losses, the evil I have done and the evil that’s been done against me. 

“Being in a hurry,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Being in a hurry.  Haste.  Rush.  Impatience.  Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me.  I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry.  But there lies a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, in the wake of all that rushing.”

All that haste, I thought I was making up time.  It turns out I was throwing it away.

Sanding away my wedding ring.

AND NOT ONLY THAT.  Hurry has also robbed me of knowing God the way I might. 

It’s true that some facets of God we glimpse only through motion.  Only those who stretch out their hand and offer water to the thirsty discover, disguised among the least of these, Jesus.  Only those who trudge up the mountain, willing to grow blistered and weary on the narrow trail, witness his transfiguration.  Only those who invite the stranger in to share bread realize they’ve entertained an angel unawares, sometimes even Christ himself.  Often, God meets us along the way, as we go: he waits to see who will step out before he sidles up, woos us over, intercepts, redirects. 

Or the cherished Psalm 23: “He makes me lie down in green pastures.”  That’s just it: If I don’t choose to lie down, God sometimes makes me do it.  That’s happened more than once: I refused the sleep or rest he granted, and my health broke. 

He made me lie down. 

But only then was I still enough to hear God, to taste and see he was good.

A man in my church became sick and couldn’t shake it.  It went on for months.  He was usually a man who went full tilt at everything, night and day.  In Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat there’s a page where that frolicsome troublesome cat is pirouetting on a rubber ball while balancing a teetering mountain of stacked objects: a fish bowl on a rake, a tray with a milk jug on his free foot, a cake and a tea cup on his hat, a toy boat on one hand and a tower of books on the other, a Japanese fan in the curled tip of his tail.  The cat claims he’s capable of even greater feats than this.  And then:

That’s a suitable metaphor for this man’s life. 

The sickness stripped him down.  The sickness collapsed him, and scattered his circus act.  He had to spend whole days and weeks housebound, idle, waiting, banking energy just to go up and down stairs.  He spent more time with his wife and children in those few months than he had in all the years he’d known them.  He read more than he ever had, and pondered more, and prayed more. 

One day he said to me, “I know God is trying to get my attention.  I just haven’t figured out yet what he wants my attention for.  He must want me to do something.”

I thought a moment, and then answered.  “Maybe that’s the problem: you think he wants your attention in order for you to do something.  Maybe he just wants your attention.”

Maybe that’s what God requires most from us: our attention.

But in order to give this, I need the rest of God.  I need to discover that part of God that I can only get through ceasing.  I need to behold the rest of God – the part of God I’m missing – by receiving the rest of God – His gift of time I’m refusing.

I need Sabbath.

One day is as good as another for practicing this kind of attentiveness.  No day claims unique of superior status to the possibility of waking up.  We all know people so self-absorbed and obtuse that they would miss the Apocalypse if it happened in their living room.  Their myopia is not limited to any day of the week.  And we know others so alert they seem to operate in a sixth sense, deciphering the hand of God in the merest whispers and flickers and shadows.  Their perceptiveness is not bounded by time or circumstance.

This theme, indeed, often forms a subplot of comedy in the Bible: God or Jesus or an angelic messenger shows up, and those who should know better, who should be paying attention – priests, lawyers, teachers, apostles - typically miss it, while those least “deserving” – shepherds, children, beggars, whores – typically grasp it immediately.  It turns out, numbskulls are numb everyday, and seekers of grace awake nearly always. 

And yet, of all days we might set apart to practice the art of attentiveness, Sabbath is an outstanding candidate.  Sabbath invites us to stop.  In that ceasing, fresh possibilities abound.  We can shut our eyes, if we choose – this is one of Sabbath’s gifts, to relax without guilt.  But there is also time enough to open our eyes, to learn again Jesus’ command to watch and pray.

I recently experienced what for me was the pinnacle of the attentive life.  It happened on a Tuesday, not a Sunday.  But it was pure Sabbath.  It was late afternoon on the Masai Mara – a wind-scoured plain cradled between the arms of two high escarpments in southern Kenya, just above Tanzania’s Serengeti.  The Mara is near the equator, and the crouching sun of late day spreads out in a fantail of light, creating a chiaroscuro of dazzling yellows and inky shadows.  In the hour before sunset, creation pulls out all its stops: hammers light like gold flake on leaf and blade and flank, embroiders shadows dark and thick like tapestry in forest and swale.

Everything stands out, as though for just this hour a fourth dimension of space has overlaid the world.

Light and shadow on this day were especially strong because a storm had been gathering all afternoon.  Heavy blue-black clouds rode the high ridge of Tanzania and dragged a veil of rain toward us.  The immense sky was split in two above us, shimmering bright on one half, brooding dark on the other.  Lightening shivered through the clouds.  Thunder catapulted from them. 

Our guide left the main road and slithered along a muddy trackless field.  He was driving toward a canopied tree that stood stark and alone on the wide plain.  He must have seen something out there.  He was a Masai, a man who lived close to his own instincts, who sensed things long before he saw them and saw them long before anyone else did.  As we neared the tree, the rest of us saw what he did – a shaggy tawny mound that transfigured into a pride of lions.  There were two brothers, huge and disdainful, with a small harem of females and a den of cubs.  Our guide drew close and turned off the Land Rover’s motor.  The lions at first were drowsy.  They lay catnapping, lolling in the warmth of the failing light.  The only movement was the ruffle of wind on their manes.  But then something caught the attention of one of the females.  Up she sat, looked intently at whatever scent or sight had roused her, and, cool and sly, sauntered over in that direction.  About 100 feet out, she stopped, and sat on her haunches, and waited.  Then, one after the other, all the females and the larger cubs all walked off and did the same.  Each took a position about the equal distance from where we parked, spaced 20 or 30 feet apart from each other.  Then the two males stood up, stretched, and moved to opposite sides of the tree, each about 15 feet in front of our truck. 

We were, essentially, surrounded.

And then the storm hit.  Against our frail encampment, rain fell, wind raged, lightening whirled, thunder broke.  We zipped the plastic and canvas windows shut, but the rain pried its way under all the unsealed places, and drenched us.

For the next 15 minutes, we sat there, under siege, unable to move.  We could see nothing.  All we knew, and not even this for sure, was that we sat in a company of man-eaters who, on a whim of hunger or anger, might rend our flimsy defences and leave our pale bodies strewn across the grasslands. 

We had nothing to do but wait.  Only, waiting is the wrong word.  Waiting implies anticipation of something else: that this moment is not the moment.  It implies that the expected thing, the hoped-for thing, is yet to arrive, that the present is only preliminary to the future.  No, we weren’t waiting: we were fully immersed in the here and now.  We could not have been more present in our own lives, have more completely indwelt our own skins.  Every sense was alive.  All energy was absorbed in paying attention to this moment.  

The storm passed.  The lions still sat, unmoved.  They had, it turned out, been no more interested in us than if we were a boulder left in the field from the last ice age. 

We took one last look, and carried on.

But I hope not entirely.  I don’t want to just carry on.  I want to learn more and more to practice, here, now, always, the quality of awareness that I knew in those few minutes.

I want to learn to pass through a day without passing it by.

YESTERDAY IT RAINED HARD ALL DAY, a grey and sullen downpour that at times flooded windshields faster than the wipers could sweep it away, so that you had to pull over and wait for the sky to ease its anger or sorrow.  But this morning dawned clean and bright.  Everything glowed.  I rose early and, before I lit a fire in the wood stove, cleaned the chimney flue.  I pulled a wire brisk down its length, sending plumes of soot into the crisp morning air, and scraped barnacles of creosote from chimney’s ash pit. 

I showered and kissed my children goodbye as they left for school.  Then Cheryl and I drove to a coffee shop and got warm cinnamon buns and mugs of rich dark coffee, and stirred cream in until the coffee was nutty brown.  We saw three friends, and spoke to each.  We sat in the corner, at a table strewn with sun patches, and talked at leisure about our children, what we had read that morning in the Bible, what might unfold that day.

Then we walked out into the bright morning.  I kissed Cheryl, told her she was lovely, and I set out to walk home while she took the van to do some errands.  I greeted people as I went, some I knew, some I didn’t.  A woman in front of the train station was sweeping the maple leaves, dry as parchment, gold as nostalgia, that lay in thick drifts across the pavement.  I stopped and chatted with her.  We both agreed the day was a gift, not to be wasted.  I strode through the small town centre, putting my face close to the dark windows of shops not yet open to peer inside.  Near the city park I stopped to study the design of a gated arbour, thinking I might build one like it some day. 

I prayed.  I sang.  I listened.  I watched. 

In all that time, I never earned a cent.  I didn’t write a word.  I didn’t build a thing.  The world is no richer for my being in it. 

But I paid attention.  And for that, I’m far richer for having been in it.

This article is copyright material and is used in The King's eHighway with permission. All rights reserved.