Two old men and an experiment

Field Notes

Grocery store flowers because there aren’t any Spring ones yet, compost, chain link fence, hose, and recycling container.

**If you’re interested in reading more of my writing off of Substack, I wrote this month’s blog post for Journey Center of Michigan. If you’ve read my very first newsletter post, you might recognized a few sentences from that. But this piece takes a different route through the same landscape. Border Country: Life in Edge Spaces

---

Welcome to Field Notes. Here, you’ll find short reflections and questions to support your intentional life. Please comment to share your experiences of living with attention.

I walked past the first man as he was crossing the parking lot of a neighborhood church. I guessed he had just finished visiting the Friday fish-fry most of the Catholic churches in Omaha offer throughout the Christian season of lent. He wore a navy blue stocking cap, dark sunglasses despite the cloudy day, a navy flannel shirt, and a pair of loose, worn jeans cuffed at the bottom. He walked with a cane. I smiled at him as I passed, and he said, “not a bad day.” “No,” I replied without stopping, to which he answered, “a little warmer.” I smiled “yes” and kept walking. As I did, I heard him start a conversation with a man and woman I’d seen standing and smoking outside their house a few paces behind me. A couple of days later, I sat in the waiting room for my early morning physical therapy appointment, when the second man came through the door. He shuffled and wore a very similar blue stocking cap. This man was tall and narrow and wearing a lime green fleece jacket with a pair of thin navy sweatpants that might have had paint on them. Reading glasses hung on a chain around his neck. His most distinctive feature, for me anyway, was his gum chewing. It was noisy. And as he sat down across from me in the tiny waiting room, I could smell peppermint. He knew the staff’s names, and talked to them like a regular at a neighborhood bar. Both of these men’s lives appeared to be completely ordinary, boring even, a trip to PT and a midday meal of fried fish. When their lives intersected mine, nothing unusual seemed to happen. And yet, it did because in the moments our lives occupied the same space in time, I was fully present, with these two men, the color of their clothes, their words and mannerisms, their selves. Through them, I got to experience first hand life’s inexpressibly full, abundant beyond any measure, flow, and to understand again that my fragile body and short lifespan can’t possibly contain it. All I can do is allow the river to grab me, overwhelm me, and then let me go. Wow.

And now for the experiment. I wrote that paragraph over several days. I had a lot of trouble finding the words I wanted to describe my internal experience of being with these two men. One morning, mostly to wake myself up, and hopefully, to help my body remember it had a brain that could put words together in a way that made sense, I opened a new window on my computer and took a few minutes to write what I felt, a kind of “mini” Julia Cameron’s “morning pages.” The practice worked, and my brain cleared a bit. When I read back over what I’d written, I realized that I’d created a companion piece to the more formal paragraph I’d almost completed, and that I wanted to share them both with you. The second piece feels vulnerable, like pulling the curtain back to reveal the true Wizard of Oz. But together the paragraphs represent a kind of whole, which is what I want to catch in this space and in the net of my words. So here it is. I’d love to know what you think about this pairing. I did minimal editing of this second paragraph.

There are men outside with a bobcat and its jackhammer attachment banging holes in the temporary sidewalks put in last November. Today, they are breaking them up to install the permanent ones. I sit in front of my computer trying to finish the last couple of sentences of a Field Note. Nothing works. It all sounds bland and washed out. My brain is heavy, foggy and foundering. I wonder if I should go to the pool and swim to wake myself up, but I can’t bring myself to move. Instead, I lie down on my bed, on my husband’s side. I put my cheek on the cool smooth pillow case. I twist my hair. I want to sleep but know I won’t. Or rather, I don’t really want to sleep, but feel like I could. The men’s machine is banging on the sidewalk outside my window. It shakes the house. I am glad there are no Airbnb guests. They would leave a bad review: “house shakes from repair earthquakes.” I’m trying to write about presence and how there are not enough lifetimes to imbibe it all. We only get one to absorb all we can of the abundance of being human this world allows. I’m writing about two old guys, both in blue stocking caps. One at PT and the other coming home from a fish fry. One chewed gum, the other walked with a cane. Completely ordinary as am I, although I don’t like to think about it, my non-uniqueness. The bobcat and its medieval attachment have moved on. I’m still half asleep, twisting my hair, typing words.

And lest I forget, the question, of course: What experiences have you had of being fully present? What did they feel like? Are there places or people or events that tend to generate these moments in you?