being present and « Les Cowboys Fringants »

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to preprare a “focus moment” for today’s worship service in my Community of Christ congregation. There are some things I might change for a different audience (putting more nuance into my current view of God, for example), but I’m still pretty happy with what I came up with. I’m particularly happy about the translation of the song—I didn’t bring it up when sharing, but this is a French Canadian song that I translated for today’s purpose. I recently blogged about this same song, because I’ve been listening to it for years but only just recently learned what the words actually meant (this happens a lot to me in French music). I ended up learning a some new French Canadian vocabulary from this, and I’m pleased with how I managed to translate the lyrics in a way that mostly preserves rhymes and rhythm in English.

When I read over Terri’s email asking if I would prepare a focus moment for today, three things stood out to me. The first was the subject of Don’s sermon: “what matters most.” The second was Terri’s comment that one of the things where I might look for inspiration was the lyrics to a song. The third was the date of today’s worship service—the very last Sunday in September.

These three things joined together in my mind and made me think about a favorite song called “October,” which is performed by a Canadian band called “The Lively Cowboys.” Most of the lyrics are about how busy life is; for example, the first two lines read:

I’ve always got four burners lit on the stove of my ambition
I try so hard to get ahead, I get lost in the horizon

The verses continue like this with lines about “no rest for the eternally unsatisfied” or “always faster, now we’re racing,” but the real message of the song comes from the chorus, which goes:

Now October’s gone in the time of a gust or breeze
It’s another year where it seems that no one sees
The autumn come with its color-changing leaves

For most of my adult life, my vision of “what matters most” has often been putting 100 things on my to-do list and trying to figure out which 2-3 I should try to get done in a particular day. I would even put things that I know “matter most” (things like going on a date with Kathryn or spending time in the scriptures) on my to-do list just to make sure that I can rank them and organize them and put them at the top. These lists and this organization have helped me get a lot of things done during my life, including a lot of things that really matter. When I listen to the song “October,” though, I start to wonder what I missed along the way that might have mattered more—like the sight of leaves changing color in October.

Maybe sometimes “what matters most” is more about appreciating whatever I’m doing in the moment, whether or not it appears on a to-do list. I started to learned a very similar lesson nearly three years ago, coincidentally in the month of October. It had been a very difficult 2019: my new job at UK was great but needed some getting used to, I was becoming more and more conscious of my imperfections as a parent, and my faith seemed to be falling apart around me, leaving me wondering who I was. I finally sought out the help I needed and began to meet with a mental health counselor on UK campus. He told me that I probably needed to stop worrying about whether I was getting everything done or how well I was doing things; instead, I should focus more on being present in the moment. When he learned that I ride my bike to work, he suggested that I spend that time not thinking about work or listening to music but just paying attention to what I could see, what I could hear, and what I could feel during my commute—not just to make sure an unobservant driver didn’t hit my bike but also just to appreciate the world I live in without feeling overwhelmed by my to-do list. I don’t remember his exact words, but he might well have encouraged me to pay more attention to the color-changing leaves of that October.

Around this same time, because it felt like my faith was falling apart around me, I was trying to relearn simple things like prayer. I read a World Church document with instructions on how to do many different spiritual practices that were new to me. What struck me about many of these new ways of praying is that instead of telling me that I needed to pray in just the right way to invite God to be with me, they told me that God was already around me, present in little things like leaves changing color, and that prayer is about learning to recognize God where God already is. It wasn’t something to check off of a list, but a time to recognize what was already around me that matters.

I learned all of these lessons a few years ago, but I’m still not great at actually acting on them. As I prepare for another October, I want to try harder to recognize what is already around me that matterst: To pay less attention to my to-do list, to better appreciate what I’m doing in the moment, and to recognize the little ways in which God is always and already active in the world around me. This October, I’ll probably be listening a lot to the song October, hoping that this year, that chorus about how much we miss when we’re busy applies just a little less to me.

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