Present not Present

I wonder how much of my life I’ve missed because I was wanting to be someplace else.

I’ve had jobs over the years where I watched the clock and wished away the minutes, wanting to fast forward to the end of my shift (in my defense, those months as a teen working at Jack in the Box were pretty rough. Especially my first day when I was sent out to sweep the parking lot and had to pull a beer can out of a flooding toilet). But I also lost a little of my life just last week, some 30 years later, when I was close to the end of my substitute teaching day. It was Wednesday, and the seventh and eighth graders were, shall we say, not staying on task very well, even though their good teacher had left them with interesting work, assignments that seemed pretty fun to me.  For the last thirty minutes of the day, I swear that the clock. Honestly. Stopped.

And there are all the hours I’ve spent in cars, planes, and buses over the years. Traveling from one place to another, on the way to where I wanted to be, but not there yet.  Commuting to work. Taking the kids to school, to basketball practice, to piano lessons. Waiting in the car for play practice to end, in the dark, even a few days last week. Driving across the country from Utah to visit my in-laws in Ohio. After Colorado? Not much grabs the attention. Every few hours, I would look up and say to my husband, “Corn on the left? Corn on the right?” He would nod, and I would go back to my book.

Even this morning, walking at the park for an hour before work, I missed some of the life around me. Because I started out with a goal!  To get those steps in! It seemed vitally important to begin the new month with a nice checkmark on my “Monthly Steps” chart.

So I marched around the park, checking my phone every 200 steps or so, to see if I was making progress. A few people passed me, walking the other way around the loop, and (hard to believe) they seemed even more distracted than me, so intent on their phone conversations or podcasts, that they didn’t even acknowledge my cheery “Good morning!”

All of us were missing so much.

Until (for some reason) I stopped walking. Put my phone in my pocket. Looked around.

This is what I noticed. This is what I almost lost.

The grey dog with the blue collar waddling past me with his owner. Birds chit chatting in the trees. A baby with a beige hat  in a front facing carrier, his tired mama holding onto a black lab. The lady in the white baseball cap doing her calisthenics at the exercise area.

A dozen trees, all yellow, red, and orange, offering a November blessing.

Falling acorns that narrowly missed my head as I passed beneath big oaks. The way the light reflected off the lonely November swimming pool. A group of ladies who said, as soon as I passed them, that the color of purple in my coat was their favorite. Such a compliment! One I would have never heard if I hadn’t paused for a minute, or if I had been engrossed in a podcast or on the phone.

I’ve been able to walk at this park quite often lately. It is close to the retreat center where I practice massage therapy and attend centering prayer meetings, so I frequently have a few golden minutes in the morning after I take my son to school, before our prayer circle or work. I’m beginning to recognize other regular walkers and their dogs. We say good morning to each other as we pass on the loop. My parents had their bowling league and church friends. They also knew most of our neighbors from the monthly “community club” potlucks at the squat brick building at the corner.  I fear that most of us don’t have regular connections with our neighbors like this anymore. Maybe these activities flourished in a gentler time (not really, though. It just feels like that in my memory, a time when politicians worked together to get things done, and compromised, and you could sit and have a good meal with someone who wasn’t part of your political party or religion and still like each other at the end of it).

But it’s nice, this little transient community that forms at the park for morning walks. I like that I can wave at that lady in the white baseball cap doing her calisthenics and that she waves and smiles back, just because we are often at the park at the same time. I like that I’ve met a Chihuahua named Frida, a labradoodle named Murphy. But these connections only happen when I’m paying attention, when I am present to my present.

If there is a question that St. Peter will ask us someday, after we die and find ourselves at the pearly gates, I don’t think it will have anything to do with what we accomplished. Which is ironic, because so many of our self-help books and “influencers” are up in our faces about goals and living our best lives and accomplishing all the things! No. I think St. Peter might simply ask, “What did you notice?”

Maybe also, “Who did you see?”

But the most convicting of all?

“Who didn’t you see?”

When I am walking at the park with a goal in mind (maybe I should do my DuoLingo on this lap and practice some French? And how many steps have I gotten in today?), I forget the world around me. I am there, but I am not there.  And when I am there, but not there, I miss my own life.