Two Metres Squared

Can you think of a time when you felt most at peace? A moment in time when all was well in your heart and the world as you knew it?

My answer would have to be the times when my family was travelling, by car, to South Africa for a holiday. All five of us together in a confined space for an entire day was enough to send my well-being status off the charts. Three children and their parents without a care in the world – school books and work hours forgotten as the kilometres flicked by.

People have different love languages, according to Gary Smalley, and maybe mine is just ‘quality time’ but I have noticed over the decades that when people gather together, content to be in one another’s company, the atmosphere shifts and the benefits hang like wrapped gifts on a tree. Like a bubbling brook or thousands of wild flowers fluttering in a grassy meadow or shooting stars in a velvet sky, the stability and life found in being connected to others brings a type of music to this earth that is both complex and sweet.

We went away to the mountains with friends, recently. One icy night, as we settled in cosily by the fire, someone mentioned how amazing the couches were to fit so many of us on them. Someone else mentioned that they weren’t that amazing, and that any normal group of people would have sat three people per couch, only the likes of us would huddle and snuggle and pull little ones onto laps until we, quite happily, resembled an overcrowded commuter omnibus of the third world.

At one point, one of the dads read one of the toddler’s bedtime stories to us all. He made each of us play a part and since it was a story of a bear playing a piano in the forest and then in the city, we had jobs like “bear,” “piano,” “bright lights,” and “forest.” He read that story with a perfect Russian accent and all the eyebrow and forehead emotion necessary. All of us were melting into the warmth of the lounge, mesmerised by the story and the way it was being told, when he glared disappointedly and burst out with, “shade!” and those of us who were the trees quickly draped our branches out importantly.

Today we played volleyball together until the sun went down and then because nobody wanted to end a happy afternoon, we all ended up sitting on two metres squared of the lawn when we could have had the whole garden if we had wanted to. Whether you only have a small amount of space allocated, or you choose to fit lots of you into a small area within a much larger one, embrace the moment next time you realise it is happening. It’s completely free and it’s one of the things that happy memories are made up of.

Proverbs 18 v 24: There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.