If You Try to Comprehend Air Before Breathing It, You Will Die.*

I had a friend once who kept notebooks of lists, and she would draw a square box next to each item. “What are you up to?” I’d ask when I called. “You know me,” she’d say, laughing. “I’m checking boxes.”

I’m at my desk early making an effort to get through a list of things before catching a flight. The full moon hangs in the sky, pulling me away from what I have to do. The sky is dark with thick clouds on the horizon, and the moon is framed by a clearing, lit up by her own spotlight. She is positioned directly at the top of the tallest tree in my backyard, her presence made even bigger in contrast with my tree.

I sit down with my coffee and let the list be, absorbing the reflections shining down, my own smallness in contrast to even the tree.

I am looking forward to my short trip, but for these minutes I am completely absorbed in the light of this moon, knowing it shines on the friend who called last night to point it out, on my sons in two different countries, on my dogs as their breath pulls in and out like waves. I savor my coffee, noticing how friendly the morning is when I succumb to the rhythms and pace of what is natural, letting go of artificial light, lists I made and can tear up, the many artifices of life that I use for scaffolding when this—this awareness—is the sturdy stuff.

It takes such a long time to get interested in becoming wise. We are rewarded for multi-tasking, overextending, going the extra mile, compelled to perpetual motion by deadlines and distractions. Author and Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr calls this “first half of life” behavior. We build life’s container first, out of learning the rules, getting the degrees, using willpower and work ethic and going to heroic lengths to make the container strong and sturdy. This is a prerequisite for the second-half of life stuff (which can start at any age), where we decide what goes in the container.

It is usually a hard-fought battle, because, like filling rooms of a house, some of the old furniture must go because it is worn out or because you discover it’s not all that comfortable. It’s often heavy and hard to move, but making space in the container of our lives means we can exchange continual box-checking for simple noticing, and wisdom can arise. Many of the things we clung to in life’s first half must go, and with it our ego and pride and sense of control. We get to a point where we just know that the job has to change, the marriage could release, the boundaries should clarify.

While I have fantasies about living the life of an artist or a ski bum, my container is practical and productive, a machine of competence. But listening to the moon, myself, the natural world, I find my body taking me in the right directions. Here, in this equipoise between night and dawn, under this moon that shines on everything and everyone I love, it asks me to be still, and belong.

*opening of the poem “Look Around” by Mark Nepo