On the windowsill

When I was 22 years old I flew to Scotland to try my hand at wandering my ancestral lands. While I was there I fell in love with places and people and simple routines. I grew up a little bit while I was there. I grew into myself as I maneuvered from one moment into the next, from one encounter toward the next. The six months I spent abroad were tinged with the magic and romance of exploration and the unknown. But it was the basic things, the everyday things, that informed my growth. 

I remember packing my bags for Scotland in the basement of my dad’s Indianapolis house where I was living for the summer before my trip. On the wall in that basement I had pinned, hand-scrawled on some paper: 

Let the day suffice.

I know why I wrote it—because it’s good counsel. But I can’t remember where I wrote it from. 

Maybe it was from a book. Hold on. Let me check…

[pause from writing to noodle on Google]

Ah. Maybe that’s it. 

Not verbatim, but in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 6 verse 34: 

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Let the day suffice. Let this day be awash with complicated memories from days past and simple thanks in the present. Let this moment, and moments like it, fill up with fascination in the most basic things situated in the most basic places.

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On the windowsill, lined up from right to left there is:

• an empty bottle, formerly full of A Midwinter Night’s Dram, that my brother gave me a few years back and that we drank together in the woods in Maine;

• a sprout of a plant in some water in a tiny glass jar left by the one who sat, before me, at his desk in front of this window;

• four rocks that feel good in the palm of my hand, each with their own collection of sentiments, some of which I remember;

• a bit of amethyst that I bought at Stones and Stuff in Portland to help me hold and clear some energy a while back when I was shifting from one way of working to another;

• a jar of Blackwing pencils, most of which I’ve whittled down with use, such that they would now serve very well on a putt-putt course;

• a rustic wooden figurine of a painter holding his palette;

• all of that and, at half-past seven in the morning, a wash of sunlight.

The room doesn’t get much direct sunlight. The staghorn fern, who sits on the altar next to my desk, doesn’t mind. A touch from the rays in the morning—when the sun looks in at an angle, and hits the corner where he sits for 15 minutes, before arching out of sight—seem to be sufficient for him.

Each day is a cluster of moments of sunlight and moments of shadow. And—How do they say it?—how we spend our days is how we spend our life.

It’s sometimes hard for me to recognize the version of me that was waking up each morning in a hostel in Edinburgh a couple of decades ago. That was several Aram’s past. I’ve lined up a lot of memories on the windowsill of life since then. But I wake each day with familiar companions who were with me even then, who have been with me all along, who I trust will accompany me right on through. I wake each day companioned by wanderlust and dedication, with a measure of peace and a bit of disquiet, with gratitude and curiosity. 

I wake every morning in the midst of everything else with some sort of confidence—that can only have fastened itself to my heart by grace—that today, this day, will suffice.

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PS – This post, and yesterday’s festivities over here in the States, and pretty well any day that you’re willing to consider it, pair well with Br. David Stendl-Rast’s meditation: A Good Day.