I often wonder why I am the way I am. As I have asked many times before (and wondered countless times more), do I like the things I like because I am the way I am? Or have those things influenced me, gently nudging me (or violently shoving me) into the way I am now, which will not be the way I am tomorrow or next month or in 30 years?

I love a book called The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker, published in the mid-1980’s and which finally made its way to me around 1996ish. It’s a short, 130 page story of a man who tears a shoelace and goes to buy a replacement over his lunch hour. That’s all. Seriously, that’s what happens, and that’s all that happens.

This is not a book that everyone will like, obviously. But I really do. My job is to be the pastor of a church and I very often teach about paying attention to our lives. Look closer, feel the hands in your own, listen, kiss a little longer, notice, lean into this gift we’ve been given. The Mezzanine has entire chapters on escalators, milk cartons and straws. It’s about shoelaces but it’s really about presence.

I think we miss too much. We miss the trees beginning to respond to spring, the pre-budding of the flowers, the warmth of the seats and steering wheels, the way the verse slides into the chorus. And we take everything for granted – especially the people. The things we loved when we met are the things that we’d most like to change, or in the best case, the things we most easily ignore. Why is that? Is it simple familiarity? Or is it distraction?

At the end, he discusses the paperback he holds (Meditations, a collection of the words of Marcus Aurelius), he turns his eye to philosophy, and the great philosophers. I don’t know if he intended this novel to be his philosophical manifesto, or if he even saw a small, “insignificant” book about shoelaces to be philosophical at all. Probably. His is an attitude of being – or more specifically, being here, now. What could be more important, or necessary, than that?

Do I care so much about it today because I read that book then? Or did I read that book then because I have always cared so much about it, even before I could articulate what “it” was?

The answer is, who cares, right? It’s most likely both. Either way, the point of all of anything is to show up to our lives, to not wake up wondering what happened yesterday and wished we would have paid attention, right? The influences in our lives (or at least the positive ones) all push & pull us, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the present, and the reality of who we are, and who we’re going to be.

It’s not really shoelaces at all.