Fr Hugh O’Donnell is a poet and ministers with the Salesian community in the parish of Sean McDermott Street in Dublin. He shares the following reflection with us, entitled ‘Adlestrop’:
You may believe time is linear and that the end comes at the end, but what happens when you draw aside for a moment and see how it feels to stop?
Sometimes the moment is made for you. The car breaks down in the month of May and you find yourself on a country road surrounded by hedges of hawthorn blossom with its delicate fragrance and a welter of bird voices. Something close to what Edward Thomas experienced when his train stopped for no apparent reason at a small station called Adlestrop, ‘and for that minute a blackbird sang/ close by and round him, mistier,/ farther and farther, all the birds/ of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.’
The journey broken, the mad rush forward to what comes next is halted. Now that you have stopped you might even look inside at how you are, not sniffing and moving on but letting be and allowing your inner weather to change under your gaze.
Time need not be your master. All those interruptions – slow traffic, red lights, breakdowns – can be gifts of the best kind because they give you back to yourself in a flicker of awareness. They dare you to stay right where you are with the initial feeling of annoyance until you discover a constriction in yourself loosening. You open a window and breathe, suddenly not overly concerned about what happens next as you tune into the music of what is happening now. And it feels good.
