Lunch Hour Enlightenment

Here's a little piece by Aine Brigit, published back in 2001. We liked it back then, and we like it now. As Aine gets paid to edit, we asked her to take a look at it.

"I made just a couple minor changes. Omigod I was so lame back then." -Aine Brigit

The fact that Aine still starts sentences with "Omigod" leads us to believe that perhaps "back then" was not so long ago. -KV

Lunch Hour Enlightenment
by Aine Brigit

Lately all I do is search. Search for meaning, search for an answer, search on the Internet for people who are like me. I search the bookstore for some tome that can tell me how to find happiness. The other day I found myself at Borders in the self-help section and thought, “What the hell am I doing here? I hate people who read self-help books!”

Now on my lunch hour I walk the two blocks to a public garden that has vast expanses of grass and flowers, and is secluded from the street. After weeks of rain the sun has come out. I sit alone on stone steps and open my book. Yet I do not read. I look around and absorb rather than feel the surrounding greenery and the sun on my skin and I realize that this is what I have been looking for. Or at least part of it.

When I was a child, I used to lie in a grassy field. In the springtime, the weeds were so high that I was hidden in my own little world. I would stare at the blue sky and watch bugs crawl up green stems. I can't remember having had any such peace recently. Perhaps I have forgotten what has always been my mantra, my own cherished philosophy: true happiness is in simple things and is most easily found in nature.

Recent months have found me struggling daily to better myself, in the hopes that then I will feel better and squelch the emptiness inside. But it strikes me at this moment that just sitting in the sun and examining the shape of the trees can fill that hole better than anything else.

Don't worry, I don't intend to change my name to Butterfly and go live in a tree. That's already been done and I don't like Birkenstocks. And I know that whatever is missing from my life will not be instantly found in a ray of light.

But as the cheerful sun warms my skin, I hear the call of a bird that I recognize from those days in the grass of my youth. I listen, smile, and feel a whole lot better.

-Aine Brigit