Simple things

Since my dad came to the US about 6 years ago (I came one year later) he – we, but mainly he – had never taken any vacations, so now that my mom was in Chicago for a few weeks, he decided to go somewhere warm to relax and spend some time with his wife. Nobody can reason nor explain why, but probably due to some bizarre combination of the stars or some inexplicable whim of destiny, mercy started flowing through his veins and he felt kind of pity for leaving us in the bitter cold of Chicago, so after a few days of laborious persuasion he finally agreed to take us with them =) joking… no persuasion was necessary, gracias Pa!

On December 25^th, after a long night of celebration with family and friends, we left Chicago at around 10am and started the road trip. Anyone who knows me a little surely knows that I love traveling, and this trip was no exception :) I totally loved and enjoyed every minute of it. We passed through Indiana, Kentucky (got a ticket there on the way back... bleh...), Tennessee – we rented a cabin and spent a few days in Lookout Mountain – Chattanooga – I almost go hang gliding there but for some reason the company is closed on Wednesdays (????) and the next day it rained pretty heavily, so I couldn’t do it and I’ll have to postpone it until some other time – we drove through Georgia, and finally got to Florida. We spent two days in Sarasota, then drove to Miami for New Year’s Eve (partied and danced all night in the streets of Miami – pretty sweet!) and on our last day we went to the Florida Keys, which are… beautiful…

This post is not about the trip however, but about a lady that we met in Sarasota, and the simple things around us that oftentimes we fail to perceive. After a long day at the beach, Kevin and I were walking around the downtown area and we came across this wonderful lady singing along with her guitar. She had an unbelievably honest, simple, and radiant smile and such a fantastic sweet voice that anyone with an open heart and/or an open mind would have stopped walking to listen to her. This was not the case though... Most of the tourists passing by would just look at her for a fraction of a second and immediately divert the direction of their eyes towards the ‘empty’ show windows, completely oblivious to her music and blatantly ignoring her presence.

Simple beauty is just too good to pass up, so we took a few moments to listen until she finished the song. After a small contribution in the basket she asked us where we were from, and she mentioned that she was originally from Israel and had come to the US when she was very young. From Israel? Oh! I know a song in Spanish from Israel! So I started singing it… I honestly knew it, but at the moment I completely forgot, that the song is actually a cover of the Israelite national anthem with some Bible verses in Spanish. No offense in that though... she actually liked it and we sang it together :)

It was interesting to see the reaction of some tourists passing by. At first, most were indifferent to the lady and wouldn’t even look in her direction, but now they would look at us with surprise and with an unequivocal expression in their faces, they would convey their astonishment and wonder of what the heck were we doing, or an ‘I would never do that’…

But why did we stop to listen to her while most didn’t? This got me thinking. Oftentimes we fail to notice simple but nonetheless amazingly beautiful things due to the fast pace we live our lives in. I am not saying that these tourists didn’t notice her because they were walking fast, because in fact they did notice her and deliberately ignored her, probably due to their superficiality and stupid arrogance. I’m not saying also that we should stop and listen to every person performing in the street, because some are simply terrible, and some stink a lot. But this lady was different. She was poor and her garments were poorly manufactured, but her poverty was noble, and her clothes were clean.

I think I quoted the following phrase before, but I’ll do it again: “Life is what happens while we are busy making other plans”. It’s good to have goals, to strive for ideals, but after we have spent years and years of abnegation, working and sacrificing valuable time to finally attain that yearned goal, then what? To be fair, it does depend on the nature of our goal, but would all these years have been worth it? It is hard to find time to sit back and appreciate the little things in life that mean the most to us. For me at least it is. I always feel like I have so much to do that I just can’t take some time to enjoy these things.

Sometimes I feel that time is an endangered species at the verge of extinction; that those that have it are the lucky ones, but for those of us that don’t, it’s kind of a feeling that time is ferociously consuming our minds… people running back and forth from their homes to their workplace, back to their homes, sleep a few hours, restore some energies, and back to the workplace… people worried about trivial problems… what are their plans for their future? Do they have any? We were born in this society, we were raised watching others play the same game, should we have any? Do we know of any other ways for living our lives? Is there any other way? Think about it. What’s important in life?

We need to learn to appreciate the small and invaluable things that surround us, be around people worth being around, appreciate those that appreciate you, ignore those that don’t – there are millions of people to interact with, why care about those that don’t like you? – enjoy the smell of freshly fallen pine needles, an early-afternoon siesta to recharge depleted batteries, a day where time doesn’t matter, enjoy the sunset as the day draws to a close, admire all animals and insects, and their complexity and equilibrium in nature... these simple things in life are by far the most rewarding and worth our time.

We need to take each day one at a time and enjoy the simple things in life, they should mean the most to us. I am not saying that we should take everything simple and be lazy and unproductive bums. Equilibrium is the rule. But life can be expensive and cause so much strife... these things are free, these simple things are there for us all.