A lot can happen in 15 seconds.
In 15 seconds, championship basketball games are won and then lost again.
In 15 seconds a man can ask a woman for her hand in marriage, she can accept, and two lives are forever changed in the time it takes to strike a match and light a pair of candles.
In 15 seconds, you can put your signature on a piece of paper and own a house.
In 15 seconds, a word or a touch from you can save a grieving friend.
And in 15 seconds, you can witness a miracle every day of your life.
Let me explain that last one.
In 15 seconds, championship basketball games are won and then lost again.
In 15 seconds a man can ask a woman for her hand in marriage, she can accept, and two lives are forever changed in the time it takes to strike a match and light a pair of candles.
In 15 seconds, you can put your signature on a piece of paper and own a house.
In 15 seconds, a word or a touch from you can save a grieving friend.
And in 15 seconds, you can witness a miracle every day of your life.
Let me explain that last one.
But first, a situation: You’re thirty-something, a stay-at-home mom with four children. You wake to the alarm at 6:15 a.m. and spend the first hour of your day making breakfast, slapping sandwiches together for school lunches, and helping three-year-old Stevie find his special red tennis shoes. You drag a comb through your hair and brush your teeth with six-year-old Mary at your elbow singing “Here Comes Santa Claus” even though Christmas is months away. You rush everyone to the car, drop the three older children at school, hustle home, clean the kitchen stove and refrigerator, tidy and sweep the living room, wash and dry two loads of laundry that Stevie “helps” you fold, pick up the older kids from school, take Jimmy and Bonnie to soccer practice and Mary to dance, shop for groceries, collect the children, rush home, throw together a salad and spaghetti for supper, wash the dishes, bath the two younger children while your spouse helps Jimmy with his math and Bonnie with her science project, tuck everyone into bed, read stories and answer questions about the color of pennies and the size of the moon, write a “to-do” list for the next day, crawl into your bed, and fall asleep twenty minutes later watching The Forsyte Saga.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do: single or married, male or female, stay-at-home mom, office receptionist, physician, student, soldier, teacher, or construction worker. Odds are, if you are between the ages of 17 and 60, you spend your days in the trenches, fighting a daily battle, earning a living, making a home life, and raising children, all the while answering texts and phone calls, and dealing with those hundred other distractions—bills, taxes, car repairs, your upset mother-in-law—that sap your time and energy.
I understand. Like you, I worked hard, I raised children, I scrabbled to meet my obligations. Most days, I felt like a lab rat on amphetamines.
And I was a fool. Why? Because in that mad scramble I so seldom paused to drink in the deeper reality all around me. I rarely stopped, for example, to enjoy my children. Often I was in too much of a hurry to issue more than a passing hello to a friend. The race was on, and I was always two steps behind.
Only over the last decade have I acquired the art of communing with the moment, the ability to shed my everyday consciousness and slip into a deeper appreciation of “the real.”
The trick to doing so is so simple that I am embarrassed for taking so long to learn it.
All you have to do is stop, look, and listen.
Really look.
Really listen.
Take 15 seconds and observe your coworker bent over his computer. For fifteen seconds, give your children your complete and silent attention during the chaos of your breakfast routine. Watch and listen, truly listen, to your five-year-old reciting nursery rhymes. If you wake in the middle of the night and you are lucky enough to have someone you love sleeping beside you, listen to the sound of his breathing or study his face in the moonlight.
All are human beings, riddles, mysteries, magical creatures whirling about a star on a tiny planet in a huge galaxy, one of a hundred billion other galaxies.
We race around so during our days that we forget to stop and see these manifestations of reality, yet they are all around us. This sense of wonder and joy in living, this beauty, this mystery is fleeting—it’s gone nearly before we can realize it—but if we pause and capture the moment, it belongs to us for as long as we live.
In the last act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Emily Webb, having died in childbirth, begs to spend one more day among the living. Her request is granted, and Emily chooses her twelfth birthday for her visit. Almost as soon as she returns home, she realizes how little we the living appreciate each other and the enchantment of being alive, how we are so swept up by the details of our days that we are blind to the deeper reality of our humanity. After listening to her mother’s idle chatter, Emily finally says:
“Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it—don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.”
Those italics belong to the author. Wilder knew the secret. He had found the key. “Let’s look at one another.”
I was slow, slow, slow coming to this revelation.
Don’t be like me. Don’t wait fifty years to find the magic.
15 seconds a day.
That’s all it takes.
Just stop and look.
With the right pair of eyes, you’ll find yourself in the middle of a miracle.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do: single or married, male or female, stay-at-home mom, office receptionist, physician, student, soldier, teacher, or construction worker. Odds are, if you are between the ages of 17 and 60, you spend your days in the trenches, fighting a daily battle, earning a living, making a home life, and raising children, all the while answering texts and phone calls, and dealing with those hundred other distractions—bills, taxes, car repairs, your upset mother-in-law—that sap your time and energy.
I understand. Like you, I worked hard, I raised children, I scrabbled to meet my obligations. Most days, I felt like a lab rat on amphetamines.
And I was a fool. Why? Because in that mad scramble I so seldom paused to drink in the deeper reality all around me. I rarely stopped, for example, to enjoy my children. Often I was in too much of a hurry to issue more than a passing hello to a friend. The race was on, and I was always two steps behind.
Only over the last decade have I acquired the art of communing with the moment, the ability to shed my everyday consciousness and slip into a deeper appreciation of “the real.”
The trick to doing so is so simple that I am embarrassed for taking so long to learn it.
All you have to do is stop, look, and listen.
Really look.
Really listen.
Take 15 seconds and observe your coworker bent over his computer. For fifteen seconds, give your children your complete and silent attention during the chaos of your breakfast routine. Watch and listen, truly listen, to your five-year-old reciting nursery rhymes. If you wake in the middle of the night and you are lucky enough to have someone you love sleeping beside you, listen to the sound of his breathing or study his face in the moonlight.
All are human beings, riddles, mysteries, magical creatures whirling about a star on a tiny planet in a huge galaxy, one of a hundred billion other galaxies.
We race around so during our days that we forget to stop and see these manifestations of reality, yet they are all around us. This sense of wonder and joy in living, this beauty, this mystery is fleeting—it’s gone nearly before we can realize it—but if we pause and capture the moment, it belongs to us for as long as we live.
In the last act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Emily Webb, having died in childbirth, begs to spend one more day among the living. Her request is granted, and Emily chooses her twelfth birthday for her visit. Almost as soon as she returns home, she realizes how little we the living appreciate each other and the enchantment of being alive, how we are so swept up by the details of our days that we are blind to the deeper reality of our humanity. After listening to her mother’s idle chatter, Emily finally says:
“Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it—don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.”
Those italics belong to the author. Wilder knew the secret. He had found the key. “Let’s look at one another.”
I was slow, slow, slow coming to this revelation.
Don’t be like me. Don’t wait fifty years to find the magic.
15 seconds a day.
That’s all it takes.
Just stop and look.
With the right pair of eyes, you’ll find yourself in the middle of a miracle.