You’re walking on a dark road. Darkness behind you, and an endless dark ribbon of road unwinding ahead. Onward you plod, wearily. Holding on not so much to hope, as to the memory of it.
Suddenly, there’s a change in the unrelieved black. Far ahead, you see a light. It’s only a pinprick in the night. A glimmering. But it’s enough to infuse your tired legs with new vigor, and your tired heart with new strength.
The world makes a big fuss over the dramatic. Fireworks that ignite the sky with light and color. Parades and extravaganzas, the clang of cymbals and the clash of arms. These things fill our senses, grab our attention, and linger on in oft-told stories.
Looking over the landscape of our lives, though, those aren’t the only memories we cherish. Often, it’s the little things. Even the tiny things.
Like pinpricks of light in a landscape drowned in darkness.
*****
When the world used to be a slower and quieter place, a person could, as the saying goes, hear himself think. If an idea came into your head, you could observe it, study it, listen to what it had to say. This is much harder to do when you and the rest of humanity are plugged into the incessant noise of modern living.
How many potentially life altering ideas are shouted down by the noise of the world, instead of being attended to and perhaps acted upon? We’ll never know. Not every idea should be acted upon, of course. But I can’t help feeling that gems may be slipping through our fingers and falling soundlessly out of sight, all because we couldn’t stop long enough to pay attention to them.
Sometimes the thought or idea being disregarded belongs to a child. It’s only natural to move past them with a certain amount of impatience. Childish ideas aren’t worth all that much, right?
That may be so. But having someone take the trouble to listen to them, and perhaps answer in all seriousness, can do wonders for the child. It shows him that he doesn’t have to shout to be heard. He doesn’t have to “act out” to be attended to.
Most of all, it shows him that his thoughts, unformed as they still are, have value. As does he. In a world rife with low self-esteem, this is a vital message for a child to absorb.
*****
Sometimes we experience an impulse to do something good. We’re taught that Hashem rewards such
impulses even if circumstances ultimately prevent us from carrying them out. But sometimes the impulse doesn’t get anywhere near the “doing” stage. It dies stillborn, simply because we aren’t sufficiently attuned to them.
When we’re overconnected to the world outside us, we can end up cutting ourselves off from… ourselves. Thoughts, feelings, good intentions flit across the screen of our minds, only to drop off the radar scarcely noticed. Why? Because they aren’t like the blazing light bulb often associated with a great idea.
They tiptoe instead of crash into our consciousness. Hardly more than a billboard hardly noticed along the speeding highway of our packed lives. Something glimpsed momentarily across the busy concourse of our minds. A fleeting thing which, if we don’t reach out and catch it, slips away out of sight.
How many wonderful opportunities slip away like that, just because they don’t announce themselves loudly enough?
*****
Casual friendships can thrive on noisy interactions, plenty of laughter and non-stop activity. But the deeper and more important a relationship is, the more it needs pockets of quiet. So that we can hear one another.
Far away from the blaze of the public spotlight, we can sometimes catch a glimmering of something new in someone close to us. Something that we didn’t know about or notice before. The hint of a feeling they never had the courage to express. A whisper of a caring they were afraid to betray. Or a resentment they need to share to erase.
It’s so easy to miss such things in the hurley-burley of our days. If we choose, we can be on the move eighteen hours a day, faithfully chasing our to-do lists before collapsing for some much-needed sleep and then starting the whole thing all over again.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for to-do lists. They’re important, and so is crossing items off those lists on a regular basis. But so is sitting still. So is watching and listening in tranquility to those closest to us. There’s no need for long speeches or profound insights. Sometimes it’s enough, more than enough, to simply be present.
So that, when a light flashes briefly out of the darkness, we’ll be there to see it.
*****
Once in a long while, we experience a truly uplifting moment. A moment of true attachment to the meaning and purpose of our lives. A stab of profound love for our Father, of deep reverence for our King. A moment of real connection.
Such moments can be ecstatic. They can also be rare, because true connection takes time to develop. Like a slow-simmering stew where the flavors meld and mingle over time, the manifold lessons and experiences of our ongoing lives combine to help us achieve a more profound understanding of the world and our place in it. The kind of understanding that leads to a deep and reality-based emotion we don’t experience often enough.
Similarly, youngsters often have complaints against their parents for all the perceived deficiencies in their upbringing. It can take years, along with the experience of being an adult and raising children ourselves, to help us achieve greater appreciation for both our parents’ challenges and their astounding heroism. Whatever love and gratitude we felt before pales in comparison to love and gratitude that’s based on such an understanding.
In a similar way, the love and appreciation we’re taught to feel toward Hakadosh Boruch Hu as small children should pale in comparison to the full-blown emotions we bring to the table as adults. In fact, it may be through our deepening gratitude toward our parents that we can find our way to a whole different level of thankfulness toward Hashem. It’s something to think about.
*****
There’s no question that life has its dark stretches. Times when we feel lost in a morass of trouble and tension. When one problem piles on top of the other, until all we can see are looming threats that surround us like the shadows of a nighttime forest.
For a while, all seems black. But then, if we pay close attention, we see something wonderful. That difficult child has an unexpectedly peaceful reaction to something that used to inevitably set him off. That recalcitrant student raises her hand and wants to be a part of things. The issue that you and your spouse have been dealing with finally responds to all that hard work by becoming suddenly less burdensome.
If you hadn’t been fully invested, fully present, fully attentive, you might have missed it. But you were, and you get to see it: a light in the darkness.
It may be only a pinprick. Nothing more than a faint glimmering on the horizon. But it’s enough to feed the always hungry thing in our hearts called hope.
And it’s enough to keep that hope alive until, however long it takes, the forest of trouble melts away, and the sun comes up again.