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:<\/p>\n
1. Life is for learning lessons.
\n2. A lesson will keep presenting itself to you until you’ve learned it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Parr exahmpluh<\/em> (that’s Fronch, for you ign’ants): <\/em>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.<\/p>\n You really have to stay present!\u00a0 It’s easy enough to learn but doesn’t become so ingrained that you can do it mindlessly.\u00a0 Nice, right?\u00a0 Well, at my second-ever contra dance last night, I was bumping up against this lesson YET AGAIN.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So I thought about it and practiced staying in the moment.\u00a0 Perfect, right?<\/p>\n This morning I went out into the yard with the dogs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For a moment, I was transfixed.\u00a0 It was sublime.\u00a0 And then I ran to get my camera.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading Lessons From the Universe, Part 1<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/47"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}