Dancing in sunbeams

This morning I opened the curtains in my office just a crack, as I do every morning, to let some natural light in. My office faces northeast, so if I opened my curtains completely the room would be filled with hot, intense, blinding morning sun (for my Northern Hemisphere friends, North is the sunny direction in the Southern Hemisphere, South the sunless one).

I looked up at the sliver of sunlight pouring through the crack in the curtains, the closed part forming a dark background. And then I saw it: Little flecks and specks of dust moving about in the sunbeam, blinking into view as they moved into the light and then disappearing again as they moved on.

When I was a kid, I thought the dust specks existed only in sunbeams, almost as if they were being beamed from a spaceship. To this day, I’d rather think that’s true than the truth that all sorts of flotsam and jetsam is swirling around us at all times, including stuff that not even sunbeams can make visible.

I thought this dancing dust looked a bit like a starry night sky seen in a time-lapse film. I blew some air out and sent the dust into dancing spasms, twirling and twisting and spiralling. All a bit silly and pointless—and I can’t remember the last time I just sat and looked.

I came up with all sorts of nice, grown-up reasons why it’s good I don’t take time to watch dust dance. Life is short, time is short, there are too many important things waiting to be done, it’s not bloody responsible. I couldn’t possibly care less about any of that.

You know what they say: We should all take time to stop and smell the roses—or maybe watch dust dance in a sunbeam. There are trillions of things going on around us all the time that we never notice. But there are plenty of things we could see if we only took a moment.

Watching dust dance, or ants scurrying doing their work, the cat bathing himself or the dog barking in her sleep, these are all a sweet waste of time. Being able to notice them is part of what makes us human. Actually noticing them reminds us we’re alive. To me, that’s justification enough.