Every year, the sound of crickets acts as a reminder. They’re almost like a meditation bell for me. They bring me here, to this moment. When I was teaching, and it was a late August evening, I’d go out on the deck of my rural home and just listen. I’d feel the summer ending⎼ the time of warm weather and flowers, the time of my youth when summer meant vacation; the time of my adult and teaching years when it meant relaxation and renewal⎼ this time was getting short. It was passing so quickly.
It can feel like we didn’t make the most of it, so we need to make the most of it now. Maybe every day, every moment, we can have this sense. This moment is our only time, maybe our last time, to just relax⎼ to hear the song of crickets⎼ to hear the song of life played so clearly and beautifully. We don’t want to let distractions steal too much of the day from us.
So, maybe we can sit quietly with ourselves or our children, and listen not only to the crickets, but birds, and other voices. We can hear the earth breathing in the wind, the rain, and in the expanding and contracting of our lungs, or in the hum of cicadas or traffic.
Henry David Thoreau famously said: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.…. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”
This was quoted by the main character, a teacher, in the movie The Dead Poets Society, which my high school English and drama students embraced one year. Questioned. Sucked out the marrow of meaning. Chanted Carpe Diem.
This is distinctly different, even opposite to FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, which can cause us such anxiety. It involves, yes, a type of seeing, understanding, and experiencing, basically on social media platforms. But it arises from constantly comparing our self with others; comparing what I am, know, have and have experienced, with what I imagine others feel, value, think of me. And then our sense of self-worth becomes dependent on that comparison, so we always come up short, lacking. There’s a sort of commodification of one’s life here, an adding up of one’s experiences as one would add up money in a bank.
With Thoreau, who lived from 1817-1862, there was no such comparison involved, and a notable reduction in anxiety. He lived about 140 years before social media was introduced. And if he was alive today, I can’t imagine him spending much time on a cell phone. He favored ponds, lakes, and forests as his soul places. Each moment of life was to be lived for itself, for quality and depth, with no separating of oneself from the reality of ourselves, of others, or from the woods to make comparisons with others.
The crickets also remind us of all that might pass if we don’t notice it and act⎼ and not just of summer. Each noticed ending is the now of a beginning.
This fall is particularly poignant, frightening, and intense. Our minds, our nerves are fully sensitized and awake….
*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.
