The odometer on my bike flashes 9999.9.
Until it’s reset, it won’t report
my distance, time, or average speed– .
only how fast I’m going
right now.
Signs on driveways and outside schoolyards
say, “Slow down.”
I notice how long it takes Fred to end his turn at Skipbo,
and how I want to shorten someone’s explanation.
I take my mom down to the singalong
and a resident tells me twice,
“You can stay and join us.”
But I don’t
because I’m in a hurry.
The market gardener,
Handydart driver,
and care aide
all have stories to tell
anyone who will pause
and see them.
The weeping willow that meets me at mealtimes,
the cows on the hill,
the inert snake stretched across my path
are my contemplative teachers.
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
An Everyday Pilgrim 