LATELY I’VE BEEN READING the latest book by Anne Lamott.  Her most recent memoir, titled Some Assembly Required, is a journal of the first year of her grandson’s life.  Throughout the journal she takes time to interview her son, Sam, who is the new (and very young) father.  In one interview segment, Sam speaks of his new understanding of forgiveness, how important it is but also how regular it has become in his life.  Life in close proximity, an immediate life full of actions and reactions and mistakes, demands such things.

These days my life is far from immediate.  I get a real-life glimpse of this whenever I hike with my friend Sean and his children.  They are in constant communication, needing constant correction and sincere affection.  Sure, there might be a hint of the “tyranny of the urgent” at play, but there’s also something very real and human about that kind of rhythm and reality of life. I think it’s a bit of the way that life is measured: rubbing shoulders, annoying others, seeking and granting forgiveness for things large and small. My daily life isn’t like that.  While I have neighbors, I must do a lot of life alone.  I’m not complaining here so much as I’m simply trying to understand it.

My less immediate life doesn’t pass the same way a normal life does.  A day’s worth of life for many is what I get in a week, maybe even a month.  The close proximity of spouse or children or siblings isn’t something that I have at this point in life.  So if I do something that required dealing with the fallout of forgiveness, it could be days or a week before I see that person again.  That’s a long time for things to fester or be swept under some relational rug.  The closest thing I get to an immediate life is with my students, those I see every morning before school or throughout the day.  And while such immediacy is nice, I’m convinced it’s not the healthiest.  Slow death and slow life: both the same in this kind of existence.  Like a life trapped in amber, really.

How important is it, then, to live a more immediate life?  How do you do it when the rhythm of life doesn’t much allow it?  What would a healthy version of such a life be like?