Awake

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”  Henry David Thoreau

Speaking literally, it is difficult to be awake at dawn, but the same is true figuratively.  I, like all humans, have this innate ability to block out, even intentionally ignore.  Or as Simon and Garfunkel put it, “a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”  The challenge, of course, is in the deciding what to hear.  I have old-fashioned wind up clocks in my office at home and at work that create the classic “tick/tock” as the pendulums swing back and forth.  Noisy as they are, I rarely hear the sound they generate though I notice others do as they enter the office.

It occurs to me that life is in large part a product of what, in Simon and Garfunkel terms, I hear and what I disregard, or in Thoreau’s terms, what I am awake to.