New Moment Monday.
I woke up this morning reflecting on how I used to not like Mondays. Not because I didn’t actually like them, but because I never questioned hearing the general societal belief that Mondays basically suck. I adopted that belief for so long. But lately, I’m finding that I really like Mondays actually, a lot. Mondays are like the sun rising in the east. They are a new beginning. They are like when my children were little and they would do something wrong and get all bent out of shape about a consequence coming. I would remind them that every moment is a new moment. You always get a chance to change your story, become somebody new, make a new choice, move on from the past. With just one breath. Every moment is a new moment. Just breathe that into your body for a second. Holy smokes, that feels good.
With this ‘new moment Monday’ sensation breathing me from the inside, I rolled into my van to do school morning drop-off with the kids. Not even a few minutes of bouncing down the highway, traffic is dead stopped. We live in a smallish town and my middle-schooler goes to school just over the border of the bigger city next door. Traffic is never backed up nearly this far. Not caring too much what the cause was as I had plenty of time, we just slowly crawled down the four-lane highway. Soon enough, I saw what the slow down was all about. There was a middle-aged, Middle-Eastern Indian man in plain clothes and a plain hat walking along the edge of the highway carrying a giant rake and what looked to be a box with some sort of Army printing on it, slung over his back. He had his earbuds in, content to tune out the world around him as he strolled along. He was oblivious to the mile of traffic backed up beside him as he sauntered slowly, stopping and crouching now and again to pick at shiny things embedded in the gray rubble along the side of the road. I have to admit I was captivated by the strangeness of this as much as everybody else was.
Indulging myself in the walking metaphor of him, I let my mind wander in different directions.
If it’s a new moment and I am walking down the path of my own highway, do I use my rake to sort out what’s not wanted from my path ahead? Do I take the time to find the shiny rocks in the rubble? Am I distracted with the journeys of others that are only there to witness me as they pass by? And my favorite… do I pick up the past and add it to the dreaded heavy weight of a metal box slung over my back… picking up my unwanted history and holding onto it like a bomb waiting to go off in my future? Or have I exchanged the bomb box for a treasure box, waiting to collect the treasure that I truly seek? And if I’m picking up treasure, am I truly choosing the kind I want or am I picking up peanuts just because they are in my path?
I will never know where that man was going or why he was walking on the highway with a rake and a box but I love that we crossed paths on this very extraordinary Monday morning.
