There’s a line on the last episode of The Office where Andy Bernard wonders aloud, I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days while they’re happening. Throughout the series he reminisced often about wanting to be back at Cornell, reliving the good old days with his college buddies. But by the end of a nearly decade later, he’s back at Cornell, now in his dream job, but still reminiscing. This time it’s about the good old days making memories with his friends in Scranton, PA. Which one is it Andy? Are the good old days happening then or now? Where (or perhaps when) exactly do you want to be? If we’re always in a rush to either get back to where we used to be or press ahead to where we want to be, will we ever fully appreciate the beauty of what is right now?

I can totally understand the conundrum as a fellow man of nostalgia. Just yesterday, we were at a Christmas party with some of our friends, having a reunion of sorts with people we hadn’t seen in a while. Yet, we have memories that span decades, going back to our college years. When you have history with folks like that, you’ve definitely got some good memories of the good old days. As I met a few new friends in the room, some of the younger fathers were carrying babies and I thought about those good old days when my four daughters were that age.

This past weekend my favorite college football team, Georgia lost a penultament game that ended their 29 game win streak and chase for a third straight national championship. As a fan, my mind has been reliving the glory days of these past nearly three years of all victories and no defeats. Do you know how rare that is for any sports fan? What a gift that we were able to enjoy! But, as my wife reminded me this weekend, not only do all good things come to an end, but all things in general end eventually. Nothing is forever. Seasons change, just like fortunes do. As Will Smith writes in his book, the best we can do is to try and be ready for what’s next because life is impermanent. He also says, act when the universe is open, and rest when she’s closed, which to me requires a degree of consciousness in our daily practice of living. We have to bring a certain level of awareness to our lives if we want to pay attention.

So that’s what I’ve been doing these past few weeks as we close out the year, paying attention. Paying attention is a difficult thing to do in our attention economy where most of us live at a constant deficit of attention. This is my favorite time of the year though because somehow the world grants us a little bit of permission during this brief holiday season to slow down and notice things. It’s easy to miss this opportunity to slow down, but it’s there. The gravitational pull of the holidays could easily veer most of us towards the hustle and bustle of doing all the things, buying all the stuff, and not actually taking time out to prioritize the things that we already know matter most. But, at least the sentiment is in the atmosphere for granting ourselves the permission to slow down.

Most of us will take at least some time off for the holidays, the question is, what will we fill it with? There’s no one right answer to this question as it’ll be different for each of us. But if we’re looking for some guidance, I suspect that we’ll find it more clearly in a moment of quiet rather than noise, stillness rather than hurry. That tends to be the sweet spot for reflective energy.

Meanwhile, as I sit here this morning taking advantage of a quiet house, I find myself appreciating the good old days as they exist right now. Just ahead in a week or so the kids will be out of school for winter break and we’ll get into all the holiday stuff, and that’ll be great, when it comes. But for now, this is wonderful as well. Sure the days are long gone where all of my girls run to greet me at the door when I come back from business travel (I mourned that loss for a while…). But now I get to have surprisingly deep intellectual conversations with my oldest two about faith, culture, and how they view the world. The other day I looked at my teenage daughter and realized, she’s growing up literally in real time right now. It has taken me this long to get here, I’m not about to miss it.

SDW3