Voyages of Discovery
We spend a great deal of time in our vehicles, dashing from here to there and back again. Very few of us drive away from our homes for the sole purpose of simply taking a drive. But it was not always so. When I was a child, on at least one Sunday afternoon a month my father would get us all in the car and off we would go. His enjoyment came from driving someplace totally new—a place where none of us knew where the road would lead. These were voyages of discovery.
And along the way, if something of interest turned up, we would stop, get out of the car, and explore or, at the very least, enjoy the scenery. The pace was leisurely and slow. The practice was common enough back in the 1940’s and 50’s that it gave rise to a less than admirable phrase muttered by impatient drivers caught behind someone driving too slowly: the pokey one would be labeled a ―Sunday afternoon driver.
Now our time at the wheel is mostly purpose driven. And added to that is the tyranny of the clock. We leave at a certain time so that we can be at our destination at a certain time, factoring in time of day, amount of expected traffic, etc.
I don’t know how many times I have been driving with my wife when suddenly she will say, ―Did you see that… and then name whatever it was that caught her attention. Most of the time I reply, ―No, I didn’t, because I was too focused on staying alert to the traffic. We miss so much when we move along at more than a few miles an hour. For many years, I was a devoted jogger. Hip problems put an end to that. Even when jogging, however, it was easy to miss things that lived in the peripheral vision zone; it was necessary to pay sufficient attention to what lay directly ahead.
Though I still miss jogging, I love walking. One does not miss much when striding along, even briskly. When I walk our neighborhood, I get to see what new flowers have been planted, what new landscaping is underway, the progression of blooming things, work being done on homes. I even have an opportunity to exchange greetings with others out doing the same thing.
Jesus once asked people to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air for the lessons they would teach. It is difficult, if not impossible, to engage in that kind of reflective consideration when whizzing along in a vehicle with only a destination in mind. His invitation is one that bids us to stop and see and consider. It is one that we should take more to heart. Let us then not only cherish, but intentionally create, those slower mo-ments when more of the world opens to us and we have a chance to better appreciate the beauty that is around us.