The sleepers sleep

“So many people sleep through life, hardly aware of what’s happening around them,” said the skeptic.

“Oh yeah?” his friend said. “What is it we’re missing?”

“I didn’t mean you, necessarily,” the skeptic said.

“Granted. I’m still curious. What are all the sleepers missing?”

“The beauty of the sunshine. The worried look in their neighbor’s face that could be partially cured by a smile. The fullness of a deep breath. A lot of simple things that add up to a life.”

“I thought you were a skeptic,” said the friend. “You’re starting to sound like a sentimental poet or a damn fool.”

“I’m skeptical that the sleepers will ever awaken,” the skeptic sighed. “I think all these mesmerized people may move off this mortal coil oblivious to all that not only might have been but actually existed, right before their eyes if they’d only look up for a minute and look around and breathe and touch and hear.”

“A true skeptic would deny any such beauty exists in the first place.”

The skeptic considered this for a moment. The sky was growing less murky as the sun rose behind overcast skies.

“No, I proudly proclaim that huge masses of people will plod through this day completely unaware of what a miracle their life is,” he said. “Maybe ‘realist’ is a better word, but I remain convinced that ‘skeptical’ fits.”

“Whatever,” his friend said, and looked back at his phone. The clouds parted for a brief moment, but only the skeptic saw it.

“There, you see? Even you missed that.”

“If you say so.”

Days of blank pages

The musician famously said, “When I miss a day of practice, I notice. When I miss two days, the critics notice. When I miss three days, the audience notices.”

Miss too many more days, and you almost have to start over again. The momentum — gained by weeks, months, or years of daily practice — is lost, or at least misplaced.

The callouses earned by playing guitar every day have softened. The ability to leap right back into the story you were writing is crippled. The now-unfamiliar clay doesn’t respond to your fingers.

Before you’re tempted to walk away forever, you have to plant yourself back in the chair knowing you have to endure the exertion of inertia-busting.

You push against the boulder and push and push with no discernible result until you move it an inch — but don’t quit there because it’s only an inch. You need to keep pushing, and soon it moves another inch, and then two inches and a foot and more, until it’s where you were when you stopped practicing.

Fret not that you lost time to inertia; that’s a sure way to lose more time.

Start a new roll and journey from there. Make a new routine, perhaps better than the old one, tempered by what you learned by misplacing the routine in the first place.

Christmas wisdom from nephew Fred

“There are many things from which I might have derived good by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew, “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Charles Dickens, 1843