Missing things

As you all know, we are working our way through Lonesome Dove at teatime. We're very neatly halfway through, just fifty or so pages away from having read 425 pages. Did I mention it is a very long book? We might finish it by the end of the school year. If we're lucky. 

Anyway, sometimes you read something that you find yourself thinking about long afterwards. This happened yesterday and I have found it coming to mind throughout the day. The Hat Creek Cattle Company is taking a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana. Along the way they find themselves without a cook, so need to hire a new one. We meet the new cook, Po Campo as he is walking from Austin to where the cattle company is currently stopped with the cattle.

" 'I like to walk slow,' Po Campo said. "If I walk too fast I might miss something.'

'There ain't much to miss around here,' Newt said. 'Just grass.'

'But grass is interesting,' the old man said. 'It's like my serape, only it's the earth that it covers. ..." (p. 371)

It was the idea of moving too fast and missing interesting things that caught my attention. We do move too fast. We do miss a lot. And even if we aren't going to fast, we are probably still not really paying attention to the moment we are actually in and instead planning for moments yet to come or worrying about moments that have already passed. We spend so much of our lives not actually living them, but planning to live them or regretting that we didn't live them. 

Paying attention to what is actually going on right at that very moment is a skill to develop. Slowing down can help us do that. Po Campo was taking his time getting to camp. Others kept urging him to hurry, but he refused. In the end, he did make it to camp, everyone did get fed, and Po Campo and Newt didn't lose the moments shared together by hurrying. 

It's a good thing to keep in mind throughout the day.