I have lived in the same house for eleven years. The same kitchen, the same back porch, the same view of the oak tree that leans slightly west as if it spent its whole life listening to something in that direction. And yet this past Tuesday morning, standing at the sink with a coffee mug going cold in my hand, I noticed for the first time that the light comes through the window at a certain angle in early August and throws a perfect parallelogram of gold across the floor tiles. Not approximately gold. Not sort of golden. Gold, like something you’d have to describe to someone who’d never seen color before.
I stood there longer than I should have. I was already running behind. But I stood there.
There is a difference, I think, between looking and noticing. Looking is what we do by default — scanning the room, taking inventory, registering what’s present and what isn’t. Noticing is something closer to a choice, or maybe a gift. It requires a kind of slowing down that our ordinary days don’t budget time for. And so most of what is genuinely remarkable about our lives passes through us the way water passes through a screen door — touching everything, stopping nowhere.
I don’t say this as a criticism. I say it because I know it’s true of me, and because I suspect I am not alone in it. We are busy people in a busy century, and the beautiful and the strange have learned to wait patiently for us to catch up.
What I keep returning to is this: the parallelogram was there last August, too. And the August before that. The light doesn’t know that I missed it. The oak tree doesn’t hold it against me that I walked past it for a decade without really looking at the particular way its bark has furrowed over time, like something that has been thinking hard for a very long while.
Grace, it seems to me, has this quality. It doesn’t announce itself with any great drama. It just keeps showing up — on the kitchen floor, in the lean of a tree, in the small unremarkable Tuesday that turns out to be anything but. The invitation is always open. We just have to be standing still long enough to receive it.
I finished my cold coffee. I was late to where I was going, and it didn’t matter much. What mattered was the eleven-second decision to stop moving and let something ordinary be extraordinary for a moment. I’d like to make that choice more often. I suspect most of us would.