My husband grumbled about the semi blocking us on our journey today. I found myself quipping, “he’s just a great dragon set on thwarting the adventures that lie ahead of us”
You may laugh such things off as a touch of silliness to start the day. But it ties into so much more … so here we go.
Things I’ve been thinking about lately:
How we let the world grow dull around us because we stop SEEING the wonder and beauty that is sprinkled around us like the fingerprints of God.
I am grasping for ways to rediscover, to open my eyes, to let the wonder in.
So today, as I sit in a car for 7 hours, looking ahead at a week filled with a lot of responsibilities, distractions, burdens, some drudgery (we call that laundry), and many joys, I find myself thinking of the words we use to frame our days and the difference it makes on our perspective. On how we approach the hours we have.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably feeling alot of the same. So read on… I feel like I’m sitting in the shadow of GK Chesterton as I write these words, so I shall share his words directly. Hopefully you get a good chuckle out of some of this and find yourself chuckling (and thinking in larger ways) at different mundane moments in your own day!
Chesterton wrote in the early 1900’s. He road a train to work and read a newspaper instead of scrolling on his phone. Otherwise his routine feels much like ours. This particular segment is taken from a letter to his fiancée describing a typical day in his life written from two different perspectives.
WHAT WE SAY HAPPENS EVERY DAY
What we all say happens every day is this:
I wake up
dress myself
eat bacon and bread and coffee for breakfast
walk up to High St. Station
take a fourpenny ticket for Blackfriars
read the Chronicle in the train
arrive at 11, read a manuscript…
[I] go out to lunch…
come back, work till six,
take my hat and walking-stick and come home
have dinner at home
write the novel till 11
then write to you and go to bed.
“That is what we, in our dreamy, deluded way, really imagine is the thing that happens.”
WHAT REALLY HAPPENS EVERY DAY
The Wonder of Waking Up
“Out of the starless night of the Uncreated, that was before the stars, a soul begins to grope back to light. It gropes its way through strange, half-lighted chambers of Dreams, where in a brown and gold twilight, it sees many things that are dimly significant, true stories twisted into new and amazing shapes, human beings whom it knew long ago, sitting at the windows by dark sunsets, or talking in dim meadows.
“But the awful invading Light grows stronger in the dreams, till the soul in one last struggle, plunges into a body, as into a house and wakes up within it.”
Getting Out of Bed
“Then he rises and finds himself in a wonderful vast world of white light and clear, frankly colored shapes, an inheritor of a million stars. On enquiry he is informed that his name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This amuses him.”
Dressing
“He goes through a number of extraordinary and fantastic rituals; which the pompous elfland he has entered demands.
“The first is that he shall get inside a house of clothing, a tower of wool and flax; that he shall put on this foolish armor solemnly, one piece after another and each in its right place. The things called sleevelinks he attends to minutely. His hair he beats angrily with a bristly tool. For this is the Law.
Eating
“Downstairs a more monstrous ceremony attends him. He has to put things inside himself. He does so, being naturally polite. Nor can it be denied that a weird satisfaction follows.”
Buying a Train Ticket
“He takes a sword in his hand (for what may not befall him in so strange a country!) and goes forth. He finds a hole in the wall, a little cave wherein sits One who can give him the charm that rules the horse of water and fire.”
Getting On the Underground Train
“He finds an opening and descends into the bowels of the earth. Down, among the roots of the Eternal hills, he finds a sunless temple wherein he prays. And in the center of it he finds a lighted temple in which he enters.
“Then there are noises as of an earthquake and smoke and fire in the darkness: and when he opens the door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into another world, leagues and leagues away. And when he asks the meaning of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, ‘It is a train’.”
Work and Dinner
“So the day goes, full of eerie publishers and elfin clerks, till he returns and again puts things inside him, and then sits down and makes men in his own head and writes down all that they said and did. And last of all comes the real life itself.”
Writing Out His Thoughts
“For half-an-hour he writes words upon a scrap of paper, words that are not picked and chosen like those that he has used to parry the strange talk of the fold all day, but words in which the soul’s blood pours out, like the body’s blood from a wound.
“He writes secretly this mad diary,
all his passion and longing,
all his queer religion,
his dark and dreadful gratitude to God,
his idle allegories,
the tales that tell themselves in his head;
the joy that comes on him sometimes (he cannot help it) at the sacred intoxication of existence:
the million faults of idleness and recklessness and the one virtue of the unconquered adoration of goodness,
that dark virtue that every man has, and hides deeper than all his vices!”
Mailing the Letter
“He writes all this down as he is writing it now. And he knows that if he sticks it down and puts a stamp on it and drops it into the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of the street – he knows that all this world soliloquy will be poured into the soul of one wise and beautiful lady sitting far away beyond seas and rivers and cities.
Our God is a consuming fire 