It was early in the pandemic when I walked into Fred Meyer and realized something had changed. I don’t remember the exact day. I only remember the feeling. There was a buzz in the store that hadn’t been there before. People moved quickly, carts unusually full, conversations hushed and urgent. Everyone was buying toilet paper, and by the time I got there the shelves were empty.
I stood looking at the long stretch of bare shelving and felt something inside me tighten. If everyone else was this worried, maybe I should be too. What did they know that I didn’t? Should I have come earlier? Was there something else we were going to need?
It was strange how quickly fear became contagious.
Feeling a little overwhelmed, I walked out of the store. Just inside the entrance was a display of lilies. Rows of pristine white flowers wrapped in bright foil, completely unbothered by the collective anxiety moving through the aisles. I drove home without toilet paper.
Later that day I went for a trail run. Outside everything was almost offensively normal. The breeze moved gently through the trees, wildflowers grew along the side of the road, and a few deer stood in a field grazing.
None of them seemed particularly concerned about the pandemic. The deer weren’t hoarding toilet paper. The wildflowers weren’t checking the news. And the breeze was just the breeze.
For a little while, running there, I felt something in me settle. A kind of spaciousness. A quieting of the mind. Not because anything had changed externally, but because I dropped out of my thoughts about the future and into the present moment.
And then I thought again about the lilies at Fred Meyer.
Consider the lilies.
I’ve known those words from the Sermon on the Mount for most of my life. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.
I’ve usually understood that as a Christian invitation not to worry so much. Be more like the lilies. But in the middle of a pandemic, that interpretation suddenly seemed strange.
The lilies weren’t choosing peace. They simply had no idea what was happening. Neither did the wildflowers. Neither did the deer. A lily doesn’t worry about tomorrow because it doesn’t know there is a tomorrow. It doesn’t wonder whether aging parents will get sick, calculate how long the groceries will last, or worry what will happen to its job. It doesn’t stand in front of an empty toilet paper aisle and feel its heart beat faster.
Of course the lilies were peaceful. They didn’t have consciousness.
I laughed when I thought about it that way. And yet something in me also softened. This instruction, attributed to Jesus Christ, is not become the lilies. It is consider the lilies.
Those are very different movements of attention. One is imitation. The other is awareness. One asks you to become something you are not. The other invites you to fully see what you already are.
In that sense, “consider” feels closer to presence: stepping out of the stream of thought and into the immediacy of what is. Not the story about the moment, but the moment itself.
I don’t know that I had language for that at the time, but I remember the felt sense of it on the trail run. The mind loosening its grip, even briefly, and the world becoming more vivid when it was no longer being filtered through fear.
The lilies weren’t an example to follow. They were a doorway of attention.
I don’t actually want to be a lily. I don’t want to give up the mind that worries about my children, because it’s also the mind that remembers the first time I held them in my arms. I don’t want to lose my ability to imagine something frightening that hasn’t happened yet, because that same imagination lets me picture something beautiful that hasn’t happened yet either.
The mind that anticipates loss also anticipates Christmas morning. The mind that replays yesterday can remember someone’s voice after they’re gone. The mind that looked at those empty shelves and imagined what might happen next was also capable of thinking about what the person behind them in line might need.
During that same period, I was on a coaching call with a mom whose son had been diagnosed with autism. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, sharing her worries out loud.
“My son is so behind.”
“What will the pandemic mean for his educational opportunities?”
“What if I have no meaningful support?”
“Will he ever be independent?”
Her voice didn’t break, but it trembled at the edges.
How quickly the mind can turn a single concern into a long hallway of imagined futures. Not just Is my child okay right now? but What will his life be like? Will he struggle? Will he be left behind? Will I have failed him without knowing it?
She wasn’t asking one question. She was living inside a dozen futures at once. And I could feel, underneath all of it, how much she loved her child.
And I found myself thinking about lilies again.
Not as an answer or advice, but as a reminder of what happens when the mind stops projecting itself into the future.
A lily does not say, I am behind. It does not compare itself to other lilies. It does not imagine a future self being judged. It does not ask, Am I doing this right?
It simply exists.
But a parent can look at a child and see not just who they are, but who they might become, and then immediately travel forward in time, trying to protect that becoming from imagined harm.
That capacity is not a flaw. It often grows out of love. But it is also where suffering can begin, when the mind starts living more in the future than in the present, more in projection than in perception.
I asked her gently, “When you say ‘behind,’ what are you measuring against?”
She paused.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “Just… what I thought things would look like.”
There it was.
The invisible template. The imagined timeline. The mental image of how life is supposed to unfold.
Not reality, but thought about reality. I didn’t tell her not to worry. I didn’t tell her everything would be fine. Those words often belong to a mind trying to escape discomfort rather than meet it. Instead, I asked her to come back to now. To look into her son’s eyes. To hug his little body. To hear the sing-song babble of his sweet voice.
She exhaled, like she had been holding something for a long time.
Her child was here.
Her attention had been somewhere else.
The lilies don’t do that. But neither do they love. That is the paradox.
The invitation, then, cannot be to eliminate thought. It is to notice when thought has carried us away. And to return, again and again, to what is actually present. The breath. The body. The child in front of us. The life unfolding that does not need to be mentally controlled in order to be lived.
After the call ended, I stayed seated for a moment and thought again about the lilies. Not as something to become, but as something to notice. I thought of the moment when the mom’s mind softened just enough for something else to be felt.
Not certainty. Not resolution.
Presence.
Maybe that is what it means, in the end, to consider the lilies. Not to become them, but to notice, even briefly, that life is not only happening in the mind’s projection of the future.
It is happening here.
And the world is not waiting for us to finish worrying before it continues.
It is already here.
Already breathing.
Already blooming.