THE HAPPENING OF LIFE AT BREAKFAST:
The Breaking of the Fastness of Things

My annual examination at the optometrist's office yielded several delightful conversations and things learned. The most pressing ones having nothing to do at all with the fact that I see 20/20 out of my right eye, and that my ptosis (pron.: TO-sis, which is a kind of paralysis (a drooping of the eyelid) which I've suffered from birth, though my mother suffered worse, and my slight astigmatism are unchanged and probably will always be unchanged, at least this year. No, the conversations lingered around the subject of growing older, watching children grow up, move away, and return home with children of their own, and faith.

The good doctor said, "Your thirties may just be the richest of your years; they will definitely be the fastest."

Fast. Now that's an interesting word, and his insight carries a weighty entendre. Fast, indeed. I woke up this morning and my child is nearly two years old. Apparently that's going to keep happening, but the number attached to the child will be greater, higher, more...every time. I've loved my thirties. I've been here a while now. I'm a veteran. My bride nervously awaits their threshold. She, too, will settle in and enjoy the patience, the maturity, and the wisdom that somehow accompany passage through this quirky and all-too-quick series of hurried moments. Fast. Fast. Fast. That's how time goes. It's like trying to hold water in my leaky hands.

Fast can also mean the abstinence of all kinds of food and drink, sometimes for medicinal purposes, other times for religious ones. Though this usage of the word originates from another time and another place, it carries with it an equally beautiful and daunting proposal. Here goes...

We have decided, are deciding, and will decide again when in a few hours we awaken to a new day that we are going to fast from the fastness of our lives. We are going to intentionally and systematically abstain from the tendency to miss out on, to ill-attend to, and to glaze over the everyday, mundane, routine, ordinariness of our life together, which are the most subtle but consistent intersections of grace and time well spent. We are going to fast from the fastness of things, and pay closer attention. While we know we cannot slow it all down, slow her down or each other, we can at least attend to one another in the passage, and so have enough memories to warm us like firewood for our empty-nesting winters. We are done with life on rapid-fire mode. We want so much to slow down, pay attention, and savor the moments.

How will we begin this arduous, enticing, and altogether unrealistic-but-hopeful process?

By breaking the fast-ness of life. Breaking the fast. Breaking fast. Breakfast.

That's right. We are going to break fast together as often as we can and as best as we know how. Things happen just after we've awakened to a fresh dawn's second-chance. Things happen around tables, too. And so we shall work hard at eating together, first thing in the morning, before the pace trips us up and leaves us left behind only to catch up. Not yet. Not now. For us, we will start our days as we will end them - by paying attention to how life is lived in the details. In the beginning, before order, light, or shaped space, there was breakfast.

Here is proof that we've already begun, thanks in part to the generosity of our faith-family, whose thoughtfulness scanned on the back of a Panera Bread gift card got us to thinking about all this in the first part. Thank you for this gift, which I've begun to receive in my early thirties. May I never forget again and again.