I make it a practice to take notes when I have calls with Horatio. He says the most extraordinary things. This morning I search-and-rescued this Horatio comment about aging: he said, “It only felt like an ambush because I hadn’t been paying attention.”
I went looking for Horatio’s quote because Kerri and I had a spontaneous-hysterical-conversation about the abrupt changes in our bodies over the past five years. “Look at this!” she bellowed, “It just happened!” Of course, I was too invested in horror at my own creeping-decrepitude to notice what part of her body she was disparaging. “It never used to be this way!” she muttered, spinning slowly so her disdain was a full 360°.
I made the rookie mistake of asking what age she was comparing herself with. Because her glare signaled that I was about to spend the rest of the day in the doghouse, I quickly added, “I don’t look like I did when I was thirty, either.” Rookie mistake number 2. Dumb. Stupid. Brainless. Dense. Not to mention dangerous. Had she killed me in that moment, no jury in the land would have found her guilty; “Her act…,” the jury foreman would report to the judge, “…was justified”.
We make a practice of paying attention. It’s why we often choose to walk slowly. Rather than walk through the woods, we try to be in them. To notice. The consistent miracle when walking slowly is that there is always something new to discover, something that we’ve never before seen. For instance, the portal in the ancient tree. We’ve walked past and admired this tree a hundred times. We’ve placed painted rocks in its nooks. Kerri’s photographed it dozens of times; age has made it beautiful. Photogenic. And, today, for the very first time, we noticed the portal, a peek through the tree to the other side. “How did we miss that?” we exclaimed.
“It only felt like an ambush because I hadn’t been paying attention.”
Horatio, of course, is right. There is no ambush. The river keeps flowing and somehow we are surprised to find ourselves in places we’ve never before imagined. New stages of life. All the time I tell Kerri that she is beautiful. She cannot hear me because she expects herself to be in another part of the river entirely. I am guilty of the same false expectation.
Looking backward in life is like looking through the tiny portal in the ancient tree. The view is blurry and limited. Ask me if I would like to go back to the time when my body was thirty and I will howl with laughter, “No way!” This day, this moment, as hard as it can sometimes be, is the best time of my life. I am learning to appreciate my aches and pains, my ever-changing-body, to pay attention to where I am and not where I imagine I should be.
Here and now. There is nothing more beautiful.
read Kerri’s blogpost about THE PORTAL
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Filed under: Awakening, Body, Gratitude, Metaphor, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: aging, artistry, awareness, beauty, body, body changes, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, expectations, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, pay attention, paying attention, story, studio melange, the melange, time | 1 Comment »
The Direction of Intention 