In a world and time when everything seems to be speeding up and one can get whiplash reading the news I thought I would write a post about slowing down.
Yesterday I was watching my daughter’s youngest child, B. She is 16 months. We went for a walk to the library and as I always do I let her get out of the stroller so she could walk. In the past she has just been interested in practicing walking. But yesterday she started to notice the world around her as small children often do. Every rock and seed and stick was of interest. And so it took us almost 30 minutes to walk a small stretch of bike path. And I noticed how calm I felt as I focused my attention on the things she was picking up and making sure nothing went into her mouth. There was a calmness in being still, not rushing to get anywhere and just being in the moment with the birds singing in the background.
I had the same feeling on Wednesday. CSA was slow which I suspect had to do with the end of the school year. In the later afternoon I went to return scissors to the greenhouse and noticed a bunch of seedling trays that needed thinning. Earlier I thought I had taken care of all the thinning but I must have missed these. So I paused and in the late afternoon sun I thinned the baby plants. Normally when I am thinning I listen to pod-casts but because this time I worked in silence admiring the lengthening shadows and the sounds of the birds and view over the fields. I gave myself time to just be present and what a joy it was. I noticed the effect as I drove home.
My PT and OT are always reminding me to slow down when I do my exercises so I don’t just let momentum do the work but I really focus on the muscle we are trying to address. And I suppose the same can be said for the brain. We need to take time to slow down and just be present. Over the years I have done yoga and meditation classes. They are fine but they really don’t compare to just being present outdoors in nature.
On a separate note Roen got off the school bus yesterday with a giant bag of stuff she had created at school. I can only imagine what her cubby and desk looked like at school. Well I don’t need to imagine as I was also one whose desk and cubby was a disaster of paper by the end of the year. After she dumped her stuff and rushed off to play with her friend, a boy her age who lives across the street, I peeked into her backpack which was also stuffed to the brim with papers. In it I found the most marvelous bit of writing about an imagined “Arctic Fox” that was a marsupial and had two pouches (one for a baby and one for things it collected). It was venomous but does not make it’s own venom but instead tricks venomous snakes into it’s pouch and uses the snakes venom. And then there were lines about camouflage and protecting itself and it’s den from predators. It was classic Roen…over the top and super imaginative. And like myself Roen is going to have to learn to slow down at times.