Today, I had my 2 boys with me. I see them for a few days a week now, about 15-20 hours a week all told, and it’s a joy in life that no other joy can begin to compete with, in a life of a thousand joys. In a recent post, I’ve talked about my retreat from practicing alcoholism and my losses as a result of that struggle, and one of my most relieved fears is that I will not have to lose time with my boys. My absolute joy.
How did we spend our time today? It was a question, a question we ask each time we meet, discussing how best to spend our time together. Usually, there are three to four components, and those are: food, exercise, exploration, and play. Today we did all of those.
I recently had an automotive run-in with a guard rail, which is another story. It’s a short one about a wet road and a quick curve, but for our purposes here, my car being in the shop means that travel is… difficult. It means no stop to Princeton for dinner, no travel to Ewing and the Farmer’s Market, no visit to Trenton for a walk downtown or gallery visits. It means, in short, forced locality. There are buses, and other means of travel, but that takes time away from a precious limited set of minutes. This difficulty of travel is not a bad thing, but a thing that affected our day together, wonderfully, as it turns out.
So, what to do? We needed to eat some food, and that could have meant a cooking lesson, or a call to a local pizza joint for delivery. [aside: I don’t know if you know this, but Central New Jersey undeniably has the best pizza in the world.] Ha! I’m just kidding, everyone knows this.
So anyway, we also wanted to get some exercise, which, for me, means 10,000 steps a day. My boys, 7 and 4, do a great job of keeping up, but asking for 10,000 steps from a 4-year-old is a very special request. We typically walk to the nature preserve, walk around a park, and go back home, with far less than 10,000 steps.
So to combine these tasks, I asked them if they were willing to talk a longer walk than usual, from where I live in Plainsboro, NJ, near Dey and Scotts Corner roads, to a shopping center about 2 miles away, where they have pizza, Chinese food, cafes, Indian food, fast food, and a grocery store.
They loved the idea! They are amazing. So, off we went on an adventure to walk to brunch. They say that the journey is the important thing, but this walk proved it. They exceeded my expectations and then some. As you can see from the image above, we did 13,000 steps today, among my highest on record.
While on the walk, in both directions, we meditated a bit, and I shared how I do it as I have on this blog, and they shared how they did it. Their methods are a bit less about focus and more about personal discovery, perhaps, but their meditation is natural, and wholly legitimate. We talked about nature, and play, and walking. We discussed how we were able to see so many things that the people zooming in cars were missing. We saw mushrooms and discussed their fragility and defenselessness. We stopped and visited with a rich, old tree along the path. We talked about building robots and developing new methods for slingshots. We saw two deer, diving into the brush. We counted scores of insects, butterflies, moths, and grasshoppers. We looked at houses and wondered who lived in them. We saw birds and tried to name them. We saw excrement from the various animals who lived in the ecosystem, and discussed the ways in which humans differ from animals. We saw the landscape change several times. We heard sirens and cars, and silence, and crickets, and cicadas, and wondered what they were singing about. In the last stretch of the walk home, there is a field of dirt and scattered vegetation, littered with large stones, riverbed stones about 6-8 inches in diameter. We picked one out, as though at a pet store, and brought it home with us, as a keepsake.
When we got to the shopping center, we decided that the grocery store gave us the most options, and we were right. We purchased fresh peaches, a banana, an apple, some pre-cooked chicken shumai, some Kind Fruit and Nut bars (an addiction for me now), a small bottled mango juice, a fresh flaky croissant, a crusty Portuguese roll, and a two liter bottle of seltzer water. It was a veritable feast, and we finished about half of it, and had all we could eat.
Perhaps the best moments today was this:
On our walk, we came across a bee. I asked my 7-year-old if he liked bees, and he said he did. I smiled, told him I liked bees, and asked him why he did. He told me that they were very important, that they spread pollen, which helps plants grow, which gives us oxygen, which helps us to grow, which gives plants carbon dioxide, and that bees were important in all that going on. I stopped walking, mouth agape, surprised that our conversations on this had sunk in and spread for him so deeply, that he was able to articulate it so simply. I grabbed and hugged him, and told him how proud I was of who he was and what he knew, and it was just gratitude and joy and humanness for us. I am crying now, thinking of the moment.
If you can, walk with your loved ones in nature, and talk about what you find there. Regardless of the physical exercise, which I credit for my tone and fitness, the intimate connections that are possible in the mental exercise, in my opinion, are harder to set up in other activities.
