A New Year Upon Us- Sitting on a Bench by the Beach

Isn’t it wonderful having a new, fresh shinny year in front of us?   It’s a great time to go for a drive and reflect, which is what my mother regularly did most years. We drove down from the mountains where we lived, and when we got to the Pacific Ocean, she would sit on a bench and look across the crashing waves. There was a favorite place of hers, a Carmelite Mission just past Carmel that had a bench that overlooked the ocean. Although she promised us kids a trip to the beach, it was that bench by that ocean outside that Monastery that was her favorite place.  As a kid, you just can’t figure out why a parent would not be keyed-up, jumpy and on fire to get to the beach and make sandcastles!   But it’s not till you become a parent yourself with the responsibilities of the world on your shoulders, that you understand the importance of that bench overlooking the beach. And then you understand what it is that draws them in, and why they stare. Perhaps, the writer Ogden Nash expresses it best, what is inside mom or dad’s head when they sit and stare at the year in front of them:

 
Good Riddance, But Now What?

Come, children, gather round my knee;
Something is about to be.
Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year.

Years later, now a parent,  I found myself driving to that same Monastery, with that bench still there. The bench was now much more worn and  I wondered how many parents had sat on it at the dawn of a new year and thought about what the new year holds for the future -and a moment to cherish the past. Unlike children, Parents are very much aware of the passage of another year, how their children have gotten taller, and one more step further out the door, and how time with them as children evaporates. How a noisy world of work and obligations can steal this precious time. And so a good parent will seize that moment when it offers itself, to sit in silence at a bench before heading to the beach to collect themselves. Sitting in silence is one of those things we know is good for us, but only the great spiritual thinkers are able to articulate why:

Thomas Merton Writes,

“The reality that is present to us and in us: Call it being… Silence. And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen) we can find ourselves engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations…. May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.”

It’s usually a tug on the jacket that makes a parent break from their distant stare, get back in the car and to the beach. Before long they are making sandcastles and collecting shells, almost like a kid again.