Two Paths || The Cultivating Project
Yesterday on my walk, I hiked to the top of a big, long, winding hill, and then jogged part of the way home—something I haven’t done in a year or so. My legs felt like concrete pillars, even with the downhill momentum, and today my tendons are asking questions. But I jogged a little. I could even say I went for a run yesterday and it would basically be true.
Walking takes longer than running. Reading is harder than consuming a podcast. Building a relationship takes more than an occasional text message, and adjusting to some new way of living is harder and more complicated than sticking with the old, familiar ways. Sometimes change is forced upon us and for me, finding peace in slow change isn’t easy. Finding peace in the midst of unpleasant tasks isn’t easy.
Simple things take more effort. I wrote this months ago but it’s still true to me:
I know life comes in seasons. I know there are times I fight this, wanting busyness to be rest once again; wanting rest to infuse the work. I have to pay bills, send invoices, do paperwork, clean toilets, cook meals. I have to take care of earthly things like my body and heavenly things like my soul. Yet I want some kind of whole-life living that stirs all the quiet moments and rush of wings into one full, vibrant way of being. I want to be whole, not torn into little slips of information and sound bites to be thrown at passersby.
I am constantly doing the work of cultivating a quiet life, the kind I like best but also the kind most beset by distraction. If I lived fast and wild, this spinning world would embrace me and feed me and call me its own. I would fit in that way. This is the world that fills my calendar and floods my mind. But the quiet world; it feels like that world requires even more management, like simple things take more effort. Everything tends towards chaos and it is work to stay quiet.
The quiet route in this season is the wild one, free and unmanaged. It’s more work, more of a hike, and the tall grasses and poison oak make me itch. The gravel road of my old walk is being groomed smooth for log trucks, watered in and ditched properly, and the trucks are starting to roll with regularity. I didn’t want to switch routes but I was forced to, and it’s turned out to be for my good. When the loggers are finished, I may not go back to that easy path.”
You can read the whole post here at The Cultivating Project, and I hope you poke around and are blessed by all the fine offerings.
