Amy Tan, author of many wonderful novels including The Kitchen God’s Wife, has written an unexpected bestseller, The Backyard Bird Chronicles. This book is not a novel but contains her drawings of backyard birds, descriptions of their activities, and her thoughts about the birds she encounters. She is not a bird expert, but an observer of their backyard behavior. Read slowly, this book invites the reader to take time with Amy as bird watchers in her backyard.
In the preface of the book, she describes why writing this book on birds was a very different experience from writing a novel. She notes that writing about birds was fun, spontaneous, a bit of a mess. and required a willingness to let the story unfold “one moment, one day, one page, and one sketch” at a time. And then she says,
Yet I also think my impulse to observe birds comes from the same one that led me to become a fiction writer…. I am obsessive and can spend months doing research that I may never use, but to me it is time well spent.
Amy Tan
I am still slowly making my way through The Backyard Bird Chronicles, but Tan’s remark about her obsessive nature is a sentence that has stayed with me.
Fred Rogers sings a song called “I like to take my time.” In the lyrics of the song, he says that he likes to take his time to do something so that he does it right and does not make mistakes. In The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers, Amy Hollingsworth says that when she asked Fred why he always emphasized slowing down and taking time to reflect, he said
I think, for me, I need to be myself. And I’ve never been a kind of hyperactive, runaround kind of person. I think one of the greatest gifts that we can give anybody is the gift of one more honest adult in that person’s life—whether [the recipient] be a child or an adult.
Fred Rogers
The words of Amy Tan and Fred Rogers speak to me because like Tan, I am obsessive about things, I like to know things as fully and deeply as possible, and like Rogers, I like to take my time.
I regularly teach a class on Thomas Merton. I am always reading something new by Merton or something new about him. I obsessively pursue knowledge about Merton, never knowing if I will use it but convinced of the value of this pursuit. As I go through the course, I take my time re-reading whatever Merton piece we are discussing that day, even though I have read these pieces many times before. Often, when we are reading selections from Merton’s journals, students will tell me that they find the journals boring. I find this fascinating because I have read each selection at least twenty times and every reading reveals something new, something deeper, or I hear it in a new way.
Though I know that I am obsessive and I like to take my time, I still find it hard to stay true to these aspects of my personality. It seems like everywhere I turn; I am told about how to do things more efficiently and urged to measure the quantity and productivity of my work and not its quality. The pressure we all feel to be efficient and productive robs us of the playful, spontaneous joy we might find in every task we do. In choosing to take our time, we choose a way of life. We shift from using time to accomplish to receiving time as a gift.
Sometimes when I sit down to read Merton for the twenty-first time, I pause to experience the spacious hospitality Merton offers me as I enter into his words. Merton is generously sharing the details of his personal story with me. If I can read with awareness of time’s gift of spaciousness, I see so much more in the words I am reading.
In a letter to a former student who was struggling with the busyness of his ministry Nouwen writes,
In order to live a hospitable life…you need a lot of time for yourself to read, to write, to study, to meditate, to pray, to just be alone. If you do not claim that for yourself, you are not hospitable enough because you do not create the quiet restful place where people can find healing.
Henri Nouwen
When we take the time to do our tasks fully, deeply, well, and maybe even obsessively, we find places of nourishment and rest within us. The quietness formed in our hearts through the spiritual practice of taking our time can become a restful healing place for others.
