While You Wait, Enjoy the Now

My grandmother, who raised ten children, once told me her secret to patience: while you're waiting, do something else.

I have found this wisdom to be invaluable.

While I launch the project to showcase the artwork of our local children, I've also taken up the idea of drawing and painting particularly lovely scenes around us in Tyler County.

There are so many.

It's true that in this age of technology, I could just as easily go out and photograph the same images: the work would be produced much more quickly, and certainly with a great more ease.

There are some mediums, however, that still hold their own allure despite the slower pace: a phone call instead of a text, a bicycle instead of a car, a painting instead of a photograph.

(When was the last time you got a handwritten letter in the mail?)

As I've worked on these little vignettes, I've showed them to people around town; the response seems to be almost wistful. It's as if, in taking the time to paint the picture, it takes us all back to another place and time -- when things, trite as it may sound, really did seem simpler.

When things moved a little more slowly, and there was only one telephone in the house with a really long spiral-y cord on it that kinked and knotted in on itself from teenagers dragging it around doors and corners for more privacy.

It's no accident that I am writing about my grandmother today. This, September 22, 1981, is the anniversary of her death, one day after her birthday. She'd been out shopping with her daughters and suffered a massive heart attack. Within 24 hours, she was gone -- but not before she opened her eyes one last time to reassure her children: "I have no regrets."

Though it happened 28 years ago -- I was in the seventh grade then, and I'm 40 now -- the aftereffects are just as fresh in my mind. In the wake of her passing came the realization: doors are closing, and after this, life would start moving faster and faster.

Which it has.

Today is the day I drink a cup of tea for my grandma, and take the world at a slower pace. Bicycling, instead of driving. Writing letters, instead of emails.

Putting up drawings, and enjoying the now -- while it's here to be enjoyed.