Paths

One of the added enjoyments of beginning retirement with an adventure is the number of friends and family who have come to join us here. Their visits have brought a kind of doubled joy — the sharing of experiences as well as the chance to show them the “why.” Why we’re loving this area, this country, this time of life. Why the experience of different has settled so deeply into us. And people get it. They walk into the difference with us, and something in them relaxes. At least, that’s how it seems.

Leaving the usual, letting the regular become dislodged, has given us the gift of listening. We’re required to pay attention simply because we don’t know. We don’t know names, how English sounds with another accent, directions, best choices. We don’t know — and so the adventure becomes one of discovery as well as one of connecting.

Creating abundance

Robert Frost, famously, put a decision about paths into a poem. He spoke of taking the one “less traveled by.” I find that we’re in the midst of that. We’ve taken a route people don’t normally take. Frost’s conclusion is that doing so “made all the difference.” And, to turn his phrase just a bit, “making difference” — as a creative choice — is what life is about.

Sharing tables outside coffee shops is ordinary here, but the other day, in the middle of a conversation with visiting friends, something small and surprising happened. A table opened up beside us, and I suggested we move to it. Before we could stand, the woman at the next table turned and said, “Oh! Don’t move! I’m loving listening in on your conversation.” We all laughed, and then — as if it were the most natural thing in the world — we found ourselves in a larger conversation with her and the rest of her table. A tiny moment of difference that opened into abundance.

Living life is about choosing things that make the “different” come into being. It’s when we stray from — even abandon — the usual that we find life is lived. We walk a path different from the one we’re used to walking, different from the one others expect, and that difference becomes abundance.

Choosing someone as neighbor because they demonstrate need, giving money to whomever asks, greeting everyone you pass, loving enemies, talking with the God of the universe in a conversational manner — deciding to do the different thing makes life abundant. It’s what we’re called into as followers of Jesus. We’re called to follow. We’re called to walk the path that is different from those around us so that abundance can come to life.