Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Tiny Respites ....and Losing Faith


So, do you take respites? I’m talking about the little sanity breaks that, well, keep you sane. Mostly. Hopefully. Times where you just ‘check out’ when you don’t have time or money for a ‘real’ vacation and the one you had looong ago, is looong ago.


We managed a couple, sort of, recently. A concert, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, interesting to hear it done with a Lute and a Harpsichord in addition to all the other stringed instruments. Really interesting to see sort of a ‘string-off’ between one of the violins, the lute, and one of the cellos, playing off each other, or to each other. Wasn’t as keen on the ‘American’ Four Seasons that was the second half of the program. Was obvious it was written for the star performer, not that he wasn’t really good, etc...etc... Not a bad thing. Just not my particular ‘cup of tea.’ Not that I don’t mix up my teas occasionally as well. Just have my particular favorites. And when it comes to Baroque music, well, that’s Baroque not broke, so it doesn’t need to be fixed, right? I must admit it was rather amusing to watch the rest of the people on stage just standing around idle - a Lot - while the star played. They did at some point start just looking at their violins, etc... so did I.

But all in all it was a nice step out of time, into a different time.


At some point you have to come back to your own time though.

And unless your life is a Lot different, less hectic, trying, and ...feel free to add all kinds of adjectives here, since I think you get the gist..... What happened to our times? Did everyone always feel this harried and stressed? We just think it is unique to our times of overload? Recently we escaped for a short walk in woods awash with bright leaves and sunshine. Wasn’t the total quiet time I would have liked since wasn’t totally without the distant sound of traffic but was a nice little respite away from our lives. Who gets to determine what is the ‘real’ life? Which has a lot to do with demands others put on our lives perhaps. But there’s still the coming back to whatever life we live on a day to day basis, whether we term it real or not.

Which I guess brings me to the losing faith. Have you ever thought about all the ways we have faith, and can lose it? The biggies of faith, of believing in God, Creator, etc... to others we don’t often think of, like believing in ourselves and our path in life, believing in others... to realizing one day somewhere along the way things have changed. I was watching one of the Christmas movies that are really prevalent this year. Was better than I thought it was going to be. One of the characters had a lot of faith in the people’s ability to change. Which brought up the sudden realization that somewhere along the way I wasn’t sure I had that kind of faith in people any more.

What about you?


What are your respites? Respite places? Do you even take respites - or feel the need?

And do those respites bring on revelations?

Like all the different ways we have faith, or don’t?



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