Take time to smell the roses – or tree
On one of those non-snowy days around Christmas, I was out walking my grand-dog. Eland is a big boy of so-far mysterious lineage. My son and his fiancée think he’s a mix of Great Pyrenees and yellow lab; whatever he is, he’s got nice manners and an impressively fluffy tail.
My walk that day started out as our normal routine: a block down to the dog park, some business there, and then the walk back home. But that morning the walk proceeded in a way that reminded me of something I probably needed to remember.
It’s hard to slow down, but we need to.
Halfway up the block, Eland led me to a tree along the sidewalk. First he sniffed, then he turned away, and then he returned to the tree. This time, he stayed there, his noble nose poking around the base of the trunk, burrowing through some dried leaves, scraping along the bark and then rooting in the grass at the base. He’d found something compelling there, and he wanted to keep going.
It would be unlike me to just stay there for long moments, allowing him to indulge in the sensory smorgasbord at the tree. I thought of all the hundreds of times I’d walked that path with my dear Smoothie, always in a hurry to return to the house for work or to get out of the cold or the rain.
“Let’s go,” I would say as I gently pulled my pup back to the sidewalk to continue the walk. He, being a good boy, always complied. I once timed my and Smoothie’s thrice-daily walks: 380 steps and fewer than six minutes.
Why was I in such a hurry? And in that hurry, I was depriving him of the many interesting things (mostly smells) that awaited him out in the world.
We hear a lot these days about the need to slow down. The pandemic forced us to do that; with nowhere to go, our clocks were less demanding. Now that we’re back to our lives, we’ve sped up again. Nowhere is this more noticeable than on the highways. Have you traveled on I-79 lately? Everybody’s in a big, aggravating hurry.
Kids start out with their own approach to time. Those preschool days seemed to stretch on forever. Once at a playground, my toddler daughter eschewed the play equipment and instead climbed onto a fence gate and stayed there. Sometimes she’d hoist herself to a higher rung and sometimes she’d sit on a lower rung, but she was committed to that gate. My hurry-up instinct wanted to get her down from there and move things along. And then I thought, why? Where did we have to go?
The flip side of that is the morning race to get the kids clothed, fed, packed up and out to the bus stop. By age 5, school has taught us to delete the inner clock and its sense of timeless wonder and to adhere to schedules.
I’m still working full time and have no plans to retire. But when I do retire, one of the hardest adjustments will be time. Yes, how to fill it, of course, but also learning to slow down. As someone who has always been storming through life at top speed, I’m going to find that challenging.
My grand-dog eventually lost interest in the tree that day. Maybe he’d collected all the information that was there for him. As I stood waiting for him, I decided it must be like reading a really good book – hard to put down and walk away.
After probably seven minutes, Eland turned away from the tree and returned to the sidewalk. I wasn’t leading him; he was leading me.