“When you allow yourself to be led into awe and wonder, when you find yourself in an aha! Moment and you savor it consciously (remember that joy and happiness take a minimum of fifteen conscious seconds to imprint on your neurons), then you can have a genuinely new experience; otherwise, you will fit everything back into your old paradigm, and it won’t really be an experience at all. It will at best be a passing diversion, a momentary distraction from your common “cruise control” of thoughts and feelings.”
~ Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance
Fifteen conscious seconds. Think about that for a minute (or fifteen seconds). In the rush of life on earth today, fifteen seconds of awareness, of pure presence, of attention, are an eternity of time. We glance and we glimpse and we comment and we move on. Even when we meditate, fifteen seconds is a long time to stay with the breath without interruption. In that time we might have had to bring ourselves back three, four times. Fifteen seconds is nothing, and yet it is everything.
Consider the maths of consciousness… Consider that awareness and love are not so distinct as we think, that they are actually one and the same, actually not different at all. Pure Presence = Love. We struggle with both, the neverending challenge of being alive, but recognizing them as simply two names for the same thing might help us remember how to do both a little better.
Stop today. When the one beautiful thing comes, hit the brakes. Grind to a halt. Take a breath. Enter into the experience and give it, and yourself, the gift of your presence, of your love.
If that beautiful thing is fleeting, try staying with it to the end. If the sunset catches you, stay with it until it takes its leave. If the eagle blesses you with its cry, with the cinema of its soaring, stay with him until he leaves you to your day. If the baby laughs, and you are lucky enough to wake to it, stay with him until he is done with you. Surely you can muster more attention than the infant. Consider that the challenge.
If the beauty that crosses your path and beats you across the brow persists–the majesty of the pine, the eternal lap of the waves of burble of the creek, the persistence of the late autumn goldenrod refusing to go to fluff–give it what you have, but don’t dismiss yourself too quickly. Fifteen seconds. Count Mississippis if you must.
Let’s build our tolerance for presence. For love. Fifteen seconds at a time.
Time to love louder.
Tucked happily into the gorgeous hills and woods of Wisconsin, I write about life, faith, and the humor that both require. 
Tales From the Nexus 
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