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A friend of mine, who works as a tour leader with a travel agency, was recently recounting to me about the trips he regularly conducted at the Vatican Museum. Invariably at the start of the excursion he would instruct the tourists not to linger unduly, to keep moving because they only had a couple of hours to go through the whole place.
Now, this particular museum comprises several kilometers of halls and covers roughly forty-two thousand square meters of land. It would take longer than a week to take in the innumerable objects exhibited there. However, they had to do it in just two hours.
Tourists would rush through this spectacle hardly batting an eyelid in front of majestically beautiful sculptures by Bernini and the like. At the end of the tours they would return home boasting that it was so exhausting that in the evening they did not have any energy left to leave their hotel rooms.
Incredibly, this anecdote depicts precisely most people's attitude towards life.
So many people are very busy with over-full schedules and plans that, like those tourists, they simply do not have enough time ..........to savour life !
Because life is not a question of quantity; Of how much you can cram into it. Life is for tasting, for enjoying every single moment. It is very much like food. You can have the most delicious dish on the table in front of you, but, if you rush through the meal, simply gulping down mouthfuls of food you might just as well be having a hamburger and chips !
How many fleeting moments, unrepeatable episodes have we allowed to slip by without having cared to stop and think about them ? But the truth is, we do have to stop and reflect. What is the use of rushing through life ? So that you can load yourself with handfuls of .....of what ? Where on earth are you going with them anyway ?
Last Sunday's Gospel speaks about the "narrow path" that we are called upon to follow. And it is good to reflect on this. It is a narrow path that does not allow you to go through if you are full of worldly things.....pride, selfishness, greed, lust. And the interesting thing is that throughout our lives we go through experiences which serve as eye-openers and enable us constantly to check where our attachments actually are.
It's all right to say that I'm a Christian, ....I've been baptised, I go to church and all that. But, what do I really care about ? Am I, in fact, rushing through life completely engrossed in my activities to such an extent that I do not stop and reflect upon the quality of my life, of my values ?
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