Mere Nothings – Sunday, January 23, 1983
The ladies of the Choir have just sung a thoughtful text, “Tis a gift to be simple…when we find ourselves in the place just right.” But if we don’t end up in life at that place for which we started, it is usually not because we were tempted away, but because we were distracted from it. It doesn’t take a large wound to impede our progress, a swarm of mosquitoes will do. It is the trifles, the mere nothings, the inconsequential which deflect our attention from our most worthy goals and finally defeat us.
Think about it. We’re inspired, see with new vision a quality we hope to embrace, but then the phone rings, we get a flat tire, a bill arrives that needs our urgent attention, and the moment is gone. We hug the dailiness, are blown from room to room and then from day to day by small urgencies until we’re not even sure where we’ve been. Life has passed while we’re making other plans. We have been tied to the earth by a network of cares that have quietly, but surely bound us.
As Lowell pointed out, ” A stray hair by its continued irritation may give more annoyance than a sharp blow.”1
And since any life is full of its stray hairs, we need to learn how to control them, realizing that our character is revealed as much by how we relate to small things as to big ones.
The answer may be as old as that of Henry David Thoreau who left civilization to go camp out at Walden Pond: to simplify. Are all of our “necessities” really necessary? Are our involvements worth the precious time we spend on them or are they in the end just another distraction? Do we fill up our life with inconsequentials as an escape, so we never have to be left with the space or time to ask who we really are?
Today becomes yesterday and we have not so much filled our hours as spent them, but we feel the loss.
Ending up where we meant to be is a process on controlling the distractions enough, so the vision is always clear.
After all, say the scriptures, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”2
1 Leaves of Gold, Lyle Clyde Francis, ed., The Cosslett Publishing Co. Williamsport, Pennsylvania. p 178
2 Old Testament, Proverbs 29:18
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January 23, 1983
Broadcast Number 2,788