At the end of the movie Gravity, Sandra Bullock’s character Ryan Stone crawls out of the water her spacecraft has returned her from weightless space and shakily stands up in a world of gravity and begins her unsteady walk.

As I get older, I become more aware of the laws of gravity in the morning, making me stretch to be able to move.  At the same time, slowness is something of a gift.  Rebecca Solnit writes about how we are filling up our “time-inbetween,” seeing the time spent between things we have to do it ‘as waste, reduced, and its remainder filled with earphones playing music and mobile phones relaying conversations’.*

There’s a special  time between getting up and going out into the day which is rich for reconnecting with our hearts, our songs, and our souls.  When we see this as wasted time or un-time we are shaping a ‘buffer against solitude, silence, and encounters with the unknown.’*

At the beginning of the day, we each have the opportunity to reconnect with what John O’Donohue refers to as the ‘rhythm of our nature’ when “things happen of themselves.’**.

Perhaps when we connect our breathing and our walking we will find the day becoming more full with the things we value.

‘Let us investigate, explore, uncover.  Let us follow every lead that we find interesting.  There is no limit to our curiosity.  Let us explore our own inner wildness and wander through its tangled brambles.  We will emerge, knowing that we are stronger and more powerful than we thought.^

(*From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)