Outside my therapist’s office in NYC, she had hung a piece of paper with a whole list of truths about life. I can remember only the first two, and I’m paraphrasing:
1. Life is for learning lessons.
2. A lesson will keep presenting itself to you until you’ve learned it.
One of the lessons that keeps presenting itself to me is being in the moment. I know that ‘staying present’ is one of the classic human struggles, but seriously, I think I have a learning disability around this one.
Parr exahmpluh (that’s Fronch, for you ign’ants): My new love is contra dancing. It’s fun, it’s good exercise, and the people are, as they’d say in Boston, wicked nice. AND. Contra dancing really forces me to be in the moment. The way it works is: everybody has a partner and another couple (“neighbors”) to dance with; the caller walks you through 6 or 8 eight-counts of movements, which leaves you with a different pair of neighbors; the band plays, and every couple dances that same little routine about a dozen times, each time with a different set of neighbor-couples.
You really have to stay present! It’s easy enough to learn but doesn’t become so ingrained that you can do it mindlessly. Nice, right? Well, at my second-ever contra dance last night, I was bumping up against this lesson YET AGAIN. I’d see someone I thought I recognized, and while I was trying to figure out where I knew him from, I’d forget what I was doing and run into somebody. So I thought about it and practiced staying in the moment. Perfect, right?
This morning I went out into the yard with the dogs. The sky was barely light, rain continued to plop down in haphazard bursts, and there was one of those leaves hanging from a spider’s thread so it looked like it was suspended mid-air. For a moment, I was transfixed. It was sublime. And then I ran to get my camera. When I got out there again and started fiddling with the controls, my puppy noticed the subject of my interest, stood up on his hind legs, and snatched it out of the sky.