Picture yourself driving along, perhaps on your way to work with little or no time for detours or distractions. You may have just enough time to stop at the deli and get something quick for breakfast, if it all goes according to plan. Now picture, just when you think you're home free, you can taste that bagel and cup of coffee; you run smack dab into a road block.
That is my state of being nearly every morning. I am always just making it places on time or I am just the tiniest bit late. It’s not that I can’t get somewhere on time. I can and often, I do.
One of the curses of being a Renaissance Soul is that there is so much to do all the time that mornings are never simple. There’s the dog to walk, the clothes to choose (No. That cannot happen at night because tomorrow is another day, Scarlett), email to which one must respond, and in my case, a whole other business to attend to before going to the day J.O.B. That’s the everyday stuff. Then there’s rearranging some furniture or concocting something from all the leftovers in the fridge or transplanting the rose bush in the garden. My father referred to me as “Last Minute Linda”. It was not a term of endearment. He didn’t understand that Renaissance Souls have so many passions, they simple cannot and will not choose. They must do them all and believe they can fit it all in before breakfast.
On one such morning, I’m on my way to work –having already lived a whole lifetime - with no time for detours - when I see up the telltale signs of detour up ahead: “men at work”. Now that’s a misnomer already because these road crews often include women in more recent years. Going there would be a detour of another kind, so today, I’ll stay the course.
Orange cones, heavy machinery, and dusty looking men in orange vests, some with signs that say, “SLOW”. As I approach, certain that this detour is only happening to me because I am nearly late/just the tiniest bit late, I am already grumbling. One of those grumbles sounds a lot like, “What kind of a job is this any way? Who grows up saying, ‘I want to stand in the middle of the road with a sign that says “SLOW’ and get people in the cars to slow down.” Yeah, right. That’s not a job. I have a job. (This job, as I think of it, involves standing up in front of a room, telling people what they should do.)
As I asked myself the question and the man with the SLOW sign continues to give me the hands pulsing downward gesture, “Go slow, com’on, go slow”, I hear a voice in my head, “Angels”.
What? I look at the man, kind of rough, already dusty from all the road work and I see him for the first time. He is an angel? I let my foot rest a little heavier on the brake and do as he requests.
The world works in mysterious way. In this human form, you’d hardly recognize him. It is only because I asked that I got the answer. If I hadn’t asked, continued to grumble, rolled down the window and said, “Great it was either this or breakfast, so I guess I don’t get breakfast now”, I would have missed it. It was as if I’d been given the answer because I took the time to ask.
Who else but an angel would stand in the middle of the road and give everyone going to work at break neck speed, perhaps even running late, such a profound message? “Slow down, com’on, slow down”.
So here I am. There’s heavy work being done in the world – big machines and lots of dust. It may not be my personal work, and yet, here’s an angel in an orange vest, letting me know that even though it isn’t my personal work, there’s heavy work being done and I need to slow it down so it can happen.
What if we asked that question of everyone who caused us to detour, slowed us down or (metaphorically) caused us to miss breakfast? Who are you anyway? What if when we ask the question, we listen for the answer? There’s a concept. What if even in human forms, we all act as angels from time to time and rather than question it or see it as a detour or road block, we accept that there is work being done in the world that we simply have to slow down for, even if it isn’t our personal work?
