No-mentum

Fortunately or not--jury is still out on this one*--I've had quite a bit of time this month to reflect on some things. Apparently, one of the best antidotes to something like pneumonia is to do nothing, a task which is, unfortunately, not well-developed among my many gifts. Though I do love a good afternoon nap here and there, days on end of sitting and doing nothing makes me feel restless, irritable and sullen. Happily, I have identified the source of this as malaise as the loss of momentum I would like to henceforth deem no-mentum.

Momentum, I have realized, is what gets me through life. Perhaps it is my type-A personality, but my best days are most certainly those on which I am flying from one thing to another, propelled forward by perpetual motion that is busyness and accomplishment.** The days I go from a few hours in the office to teaching a class to leading a bible study to a meeting of the worship committee to a hospital visit to an evening of socializing with friends...these are the days on which I feel most truly alive: the days when it feels I am moving forward. But it's not just days, I have realized in my asthmatic-induced hermitage; it's a lifetime. Most of my life I have felt propelled from one thing to the next by the sheer velocity of the speed I was already going: the whirr of high school whipped me right on into the tumult of college which tossed me into a first job which hadn't even ended before the second arrived and helped me to hone my skills and interests so I could could apply to graduate school where, once accepted, I was swept up in the tornado of that time and place and constantly preparing for my first "real" job which I started a few days after I graduated and went on for a few years until a few days before I came to this one. 

But there is a catch. And you know what it is if you bothered to read the footnote. Perpetual motion, as it turns out, doesn't actually work. Things, though inexplicable theoretically, slow down eventually. And my newest insight is that I will too, not only through bronchial trauma, but because the milestones of my life are bound to be fewer and further between in my next 30 years as they have been in the first 30. It seems the perpetual motion of my relatively balanced existence at this moment can surely not slingshot me all the way. And so what has been a carnival ride must now become a distance sport, for which I may need to develop a different set of skills and priorities.

If there is one thing I have learned in my current post--and I am grateful to those who have shared their journey with me--it is that one of the most difficult realities of human life is that reality of aging. Getting older, from all I can observe in those whom I serve, is TOUGH business: not for the weak of heart. And crafting a life of meaning, relationships with substance, and a set of principles which sustain one when the momentum of life slows to a crawl, is a task for the wise, one of which I hope I will become as I settle into the reality of no-mentum as lifestyle, not lethargy.






*Though one juror, the one with whom I happen to co-habitate, has weighed in. His decision? As my mother used to say, "I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count."
**I will admit to you--because this is the web and feels anonymous though I need to remind myself that it is NOT--that I just wikipedia-d "perpetual motion machine" to confirm that no such a thing has yet been invented. Clearly, I haven't been reading the science section of the paper recently  or really ever in the last 15 years. You will be glad to know it has not....some problem with "over-unity." Read more here.