Jake and I decided to go to the park after school on Tuesday. Usually we go home and play with the hounds or draw with chalk on the sidewalk or fast forward through Sesame Street on TiVo until we find good songs about dogs or the beach. But on Tuesday the weather was lovely and I had a rare surge of energy powerful enough to shake me out of the usual pattern.
"Do you want to go to the park?" I asked him when I picked him up from school, feeling no small bit of satisfaction that his teachers knew I was doing something other than taking him home to watch Sesame Street.
"Pahk." Jake nodded approvingly as he headed for his stroller.
It still wasn't guaranteed we'd make it to the park. I knew that partway there, as we neared the turn-off for home, I could easily convince myself that Jake had forgotten all about my promise to go to the park, or, if not, would probably think he had misunderstood me and would be content with the sidewalk chalk.
I was, therefore, more than a little bit amazed and excited to find myself steering the stroller straight instead of turning left to follow the route home.
The park is just a few blocks from our house, and yet it's been weeks since we visited. Once upon a time, we took the hounds there every morning to let them chase tennis balls on the unused baseball field. Even into December, we bundled up, and I wrapped my arms around Jake, following the girls' gambols with glee.
Then, I don't know, it got too cold, and Jake got too interested in squirming out of my arms into the red mud of the infield, and Mike grew to enjoy savoring a cup of morning coffee on the floor of the living room while Jake sat in his lap with a book.
Of course, we took Jake there on weekends, especially in the spring as the weather picked up. But lately there have been so many rib fests and Coon Dog Days and farmers markets that we just haven't needed the park. Plus, I frequently found myself feeling a little bit lonely and isolated as the other parents reclined on benches and gossiped while I awkwardly climbed the play structure and slid down the slide with Jake.
Don't get me wrong. There is great joy to be had going down a children's slide in your 40's, especially (but not necessarily) with an excited toddler in your lap. But in an odd inversion of the adult-child relationship, my small child's attention span for such activity far, far exceeds mine. It is exceeded, in fact, only by my desire to put off the tantrum that I fear will accompany my suggestion that we leave the park before he has been down the slide the proper number of times. Which is why we have spent so much time going down the slide together as to leave me rather wearied of the park.
But Jake is older now, so much older than four or five weeks ago. For example, when I took him out of his stroller when we arrived at the park on Wednesday, he grabbed my hand and said, "Wahk," instead of making me carry him around the area intended for kids to run and tire themselves out so their parents have a hope of finally watching Recount which they TiVo'd from HBO a couple months ago and which has fallen all the way to the bottom of the "Now Playing" screen.
We spent some time on the swing and in the sandbox, and I could tell things were different. It was no longer a matter of Jake being mostly interested in watching how other kids play; he quite got it himself. But the big change came when we wandered over to the play structure.
Jake ran up to it and hauled himself up the big steps. He walked upright along the row of smaller steps, holding onto the rail next to him instead of the stair in front of him, as he's forced to do by the frustrating, infantilizing stairs at home.
And then he sat himself down at the top of the slide, gave me a big grin, and slid down. As I stood at the bottom to catch him.
It was a perfect moment to be in the moment, a pinpoint of perfection between past and future.
Why Every Moment Except This One Is Scary or Enticing or Just Plain Distracting
What made that moment when Jake went down the slide on his own so perfect wasn't just his beautiful baby cheeks glowing in the midst of that alabaster skin. Or the gap-toothed grin and shriek he gave. Or the feel of his soft, solid baby body thudding into my arms. Although each of these things will cement the moment in my memory.
What made it perfect was that for a pure, clear, smelling-like-an-early-morning instant, I had no memories. I didn't relate Jake going down the slide on his own to the countless times I had done it with him. I didn't muddy those memories by thinking what a relief it would be not to have to do it ever again. I didn't have one of those moments when you are thrilled at how your child is growing up and immediately panicked at the notion that you are going to rush him along and miss these beautiful days that you will never have again.
Nor was I projecting into the future, calculating just how long it will be until I don't even have to linger at the bottom of the slide but will be able to drape myself over a bench in the shade and make friends my own age. I wasn't wondering if Jake will be a decent athlete, if he will become one of those annoying and slightly menacing teenagers who so frequently occupy the play structure, intimidating small boys and, although they don't show it, small boys' mothers. I wasn't picturing myself as the mother of a five-year-old or a fourteen-year-old or a young man who has gone off to college and left his mother to finally, finally have her life all to herself again.
No, the moment Jake went down the slide by himself was beautiful in its own, complete way. So beautiful it allowed me to experience effortlessly the beauty of being in the moment.
Is It Even Possible to Be in the Moment for More Than a Moment?
A friend of mine recently told me I ought to record Jake speaking his charming toddler speak because one day, like her, I would hear it give way to a surly teenager's voice. She allowed that her sister had given her the same advice, which she had failed to follow. Perhaps she was acknowledging that the odds of my heeding what she hadn't were slim indeed. After all, we still haven't figured out how to use the video camera I gave Mike for Father's Day in 2007.
But the reason I haven't found myself spurred to action—much as I love, love, love Jake's voice and the mini-sentences he creates with it—isn't mere laziness. A good dose of laziness, yes. But there's more to it.
It's the same conversation I have with myself when I reckon I ought to be recording the dates of each one of Jake's new words. Or taking pictures of him tasting his first, all-organic, Mommy-made oatmeal raisin cookie. (I did manage to memorialize his first White Castle hamburger, which seems strangely incongruous, given my yoga-eating ways.) I haven't saved any locks of hair (he really doesn't have any to spare). I'm pretty good at collecting his art projects in a handy clip/magnet that I plunk to the side of the refrigerator, but I know for a fact I allowed the "latkes" he made (a bunch of tan and brown construction paper strips glued to a paper plate) to languish between the green armchair and the window seat that we don't use as a window seat before guiltily throwing this masterpiece in the trash.
Much as I might enjoy having these mementos one future day, I fear that if I'm too focused on collecting them now, I will miss the joy of simply experiencing Jake's moments in the moment.
It reminds me of the friend we all have who spends an entire vacation behind the lens of his camera. He insists he's enjoying himself, but—even between bouts of swearing at the idiot who just walked right across his view of a dachshund walking in front of a hot dog stand—you wonder if he can recall just what we were doing on vacation, rather than what the people caught in the lens of his camera around us were doing.
I know there will come a time when I will wish for a slip of something of toddler Jake to hold onto besides memories. But maybe that piece of something will distort my memory just as much as time itself. And maybe the point isn't so much to remember joyful parts of our past as to live them joyfully when they are the present.
This is one of the gifts of yoga.
In an asana practice, we start to gain the discipline to focus on the moment by holding poses that may at times make us long for a future where we are lying on the floor in savasana. We practice with even greater discipline in meditation, when, over and over and then over again, we gently shoo away intruding thoughts of what we did yesterday or need to do tomorrow to just sit in an unclouded present.
What's the point of all this be-in-the-moment discipline? In part, I think, it's to free us from judging ourselves, figuring out what we should be doing by what we have been doing or will be doing. It's hard to follow your heart when you don't know what it wants, only where your mind thinks you should go.
In a related way, learning to be in the moment brings us closer to ourselves. I have felt saddened lately by all the ways the world in which we live encourages us to separate from ourselves. It's so easy to eat thoughtlessly. (If it tastes good and is convenient, how hard is it to think about whether it will make us feel good later?) Modern medicine offers us opportunities to avoid the slightest discomfort, even though discomfort is part of having a body. (How many times have you had to struggle over whether your head hurts enough to take an aspirin?) We are encouraged to move into professions where we spend all day thinking about other people's problems rather than our own lives.
At the end, we are left to marvel at the ability of the very young to act with such utter, unself-conscious joy. Because they still know exactly what makes them happy and don't hesitate to throw themselves into it.
So, being in the moment, it's a life-long practice. It's not possible to live entirely in the moment in a world full of appointments and freeways and cell phones and the internet. But in the very practice we become wiser.
And when we find those gems of moments when it all clicks into place—when a thrilled nineteen-month-old redhead scoots himself to the top of a slide—we understand what life is about.
Virabhadrasana II (Warrior II) -- Command the Present
It goes without saying that the best way to learn how to be in the moment is to meditate. But often we need a jump-start, something more visceral and physical to teach our minds how to stop and be. Plus, I feel that posture is a huge part of meditation—lean too far back and your mind tends to drift to the past, notice yourself lurching forward and chances are you're thinking about the future.
Virabhadrasana II gives you a physical place to literally center yourself. In the pose, there is a natural tendency to lean one's whole body forward—over the front foot. I imagine it's because of the energy it takes to create this pose, the sort of energy that makes you want to surge ahead. What a lovely discipline to harness that energy and use it to open your heart instead of rushing to the next task.
At the same time, to keep from lurching forward, we have to give attention to the back leg and back arm, the place we're not looking. Give in too strongly to that behind-us direction and you lose the power of the pose; it becomes soft and unfocused.
But take the time to find the exact center of the pose—a place where your spine is straight and strong and right between your outstretched arms and feet—and you will teach your mind to center itself between past and future as well.
So take your time in your next Virabhadrasana II. And see if you don't appreciate some gem of a moment in your life off the mat soon thereafter.
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