Beware, keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come.  Mark 13:33.

We’re heading into that “awareness” season again.  Advent always is a call to “wake up.”  To be attentive.  To wait for the Lord to come.

The late Anthony DeMello, priest, retreat leader and writer, often said that most of us go through life as though we are asleep.  I tend to agree with that.  Sometimes it takes a big nudge to get us to wake up to what is really around us.  What is really important.

Odd as it sounds, a used motor scooter that came into my life a year and a half ago has become a window into awareness for me. I bought this scooter (dubbed Isabella) after a visit to Florence, Italy, where it seemed that everyone was getting around on these two-wheeled marvels.  “I could do that,” I thought, remembering that my commute to Paulsen House is only two miles.

My scooter interest couldn’t have come at a better time. Gas prices were skyrocketing and the prospect of 100 mpg was irresistible.  So on those days when it isn’t raining or snowing and I don’t have errands that take me on busy streets, Isabella is my transportation.

I’ve learned a lot from my scooter-riding adventures.  Patience, for instance.  Isabella’s 49-cc engine putt-putts along at about 25 mph if there isn’t a hill.  Don’t even ask about the uphill speed!  For a person who usually moves pretty fast, my uphill journey home is an exercise in slow motion.

But the bonus is that I get to experience so much more.  I can savor the aroma of newly-mown grass and blooming flowers in the spring and summer.   I can marvel at the astonishing color of the trees in the fall and watch the first fallen leaves flutter across the pavement.  I can see children at play and neighbors visiting across the fence.  When I drive the car all of this is there but I don’t notice it in the same way.

But maybe the bigger learning is a more intense kind of awareness.  Anyone who rides a bicycle, scooter or motorcycle (or tries to cross the street as a pedestrian in Spokane) has heard this good advice:  “Always assume you are invisible to drivers.”  This includes drivers backing out of parking spaces and drivers heading forward in broad daylight.

Riding to work without the protective shell of my car makes me vulnerable to everyone backing out of a driveway, drifting through a stop sign, failing to yield the right of way or simply driving on zoned-out auto pilot.

So I’ve learned to ride with intense attentiveness.  (My scariest moment so far was when an adult bicyclist shot through a stop sign and on to a major arterial just in front of me.)  Luckily, Isabella has good brakes.

To be perfectly honest, attentiveness is a matter of life and death when you’re on a cycle or scooter.

I think about the connections between that intense awareness and the Advent awareness to which we are called in this season.  Advent brings a unique invitation to wait and watch – to wait for the Lord, both as we anticipate the celebration of his birth at Christmas and his coming again in glory.  It is more than ramping up to Christmas.  It is ramping up to eternity.  May these Advent days be for us a time of waiting and watching—a time to be awake and aware.