The hyper-activity of the past few days, during which I have thrown myself into woodwork, has taken its toll. Several years ago I had a fall while climbing and broke both wrists. The left one was damaged more seriously than the right one, and required clever things to be done with bits of wire. For most of the time I experience no discomfort whatsoever, but just occasionally heavy use of my left hand takes its toll. As I am left-handed the constant sawing of wood and manipulation of an electric drill for several days running has left me in some discomfort. I woke in the night aware that I really ought to get up and take an analgesic.
Despite the beneficial effects of a couple of pills I have been aware throughout the day that I really needed to rest my wrist, so the most demanding thing I’ve done all day is a little food-shopping. The change has been really beneficial in a way I didn’t expect. In the later part of the morning I found that I had the opportunity simply to sit, look out on the garden, and actually live in the moment. We are often urged to do this, but somehow it rarely happens. I discovered that there is a considerable difference between mere inactivity and being in the moment.
By coincidence, as I drove back from the supermarket this morning, Richard Harries (a former Bishop of Oxford) was speaking on the radio, and mentioned in passing the work of a French Jesuit thinker (I think from the late eighteenth century), Jean-Pierre de Caussade. I encountered his ideas back in 2009, when I first exhibited my Four Quartets series in Doncaster Minster. He is probably best-known for his concept of the “sacrament of the present moment”. Perhaps I should refresh my memory in this respect.
It is interesting to think that Caussade seems to have anticipated by some considerable time the currently fashionable notion of “mindfulness”, with the difference, of course, that it seems as if he might have suggested that it is possible to be mindfully inactive as well as mindfully doing something. Whatever is the case here, I believe that I ought to be doing nothing mindfully more frequently, as I certainly experienced the benefit of it.