My mother, the central force in my life, died last month. The last time she was upset with me was when she saw me talking with my children and opening my mail at the same time. She despised multi-tasking. She believed it was a way to miss life, to miss the gifts that come only when you give 100% of yourself to a task, a relationship, a moment.
In the weeks since her death, I’ve realized that she and I had an unspoken deal: hers would be the rhythm of a timeless world, a child’s rhythm; mine was the rhythm of the modern world. While I had the sense every time I looked at my watch that it was later than I thought, she lived in a world where there were no impersonal encounters, where a trip to the farmer’s market happily filled half a day, where there was always enough time for wonder at how lovely the rosemary looked next to the lavender. In fact, going through the market with her was like walking through the Louvre with an art connoisseur – except that you could touch and smell these still lifes.
She left no will and no prized possessions – which is not surprising, considering her habit of giving such things away. For instance, there was the time we tried to give her a second watch, and within 48 hours she had given it to someone else. So what she’s left us with is the treasure house of her spirit. It’s as though certain gifts can only be bequeathed at one’s death: that while she was alive she so embodied the qualities of nurturing, simplicity, unconditional loving and a connection with the sacred that it felt as if those dimensions of life were taken care of for all those blessed to be in her orbit. Why learn how to cook when you live with The Iron Chef?
And now that she’s gone, I know that however difficult, inconvenient, even unnatural it may be for a while, there is only one way to honor her: by living differently, living more like she lived, bridging the world of the urgent with the world of miracles and wonder. The first world, the world we inhabit most of the time, is governed by our appetites: the next promotion, the next conquest, the next hot meal. The other is the universe where fishes and loaves can multiply and we can love our neighbor as ourselves.
Yet we have been sacrificing the important on the altar of the urgent for so long that our lives have lost their balance and we have lost our center. And, of course, we have massively redefined the urgent. It’s no longer just dealing with a blazing fire, it’s rather worrying about the probability of a fire starting and especially about the possibility of missing some fireworks. Some of my most beloved friends feel alive only when they are living life on the brink, dealing with half a dozen crises, wallowing in the drama of it all, and having to drug themselves before they can go back to sleep when they wake up in the middle of the night.
To move the important to the center of our existence and tend to our souls – which for me is the meaning of Shabbat – we need to bring timelessness into our lives. It also means, as my mother would urge, putting an end to multi-tasking – the weapon that helps us gain the heights, but is the enemy of the depths. And it is only when we tap into the depths that we redeem from them the spirit, the imagination and the intuitive abilities that have been crushed under the pressures of modern life, where clock and compass are used to calculate the span of our every action, desire and thought.
What modern man calls intuition, the ancients often understood as spiritual guidance from another realm – divine tidings, prophetic warnings.
But our modern lives are, more often than not, case studies not of the whispered voice followed but of the whispered voice ignored or denied – often at our peril.
When the practice of Shabbat becomes not simply a day off but a new way of life, we are freed from the tyranny of the urgent. And then we can allow gratitude to enter our lives. Gratitude has always been for me one of the most powerful emotions. But it is very hard to manifest in a life that is a race with time.
My mother used to say that the goal of life is not to see what we can make of it, but what it can make of us. And for that we don’t have to go east or west, to India or Walden Pond, but we do have to – and not just now and then – pull out of the fast lane.
Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of eight books, including her most recent book, How To Overthrow The Government, on the corruption of our political system and the need for reform. To learn more about Arianna and her views, please visit www.ariannaonline.com