Gift of Appreciation

It was almost surreal. The weather back in Minnesota was growing colder by the hour. Snow flurries had followed me out to the airport. Now later that same day I was working up a sweat on my inaugural mountain hike of the season.  There was beauty all around me yet I wasn’t feeling the love. Things should have been really great back in Palm Springs but I wasn’t able to appreciate my good fortune being in the desert instead of under three feet of snow back home. So I continued trudging upwards toward my tabernacle.

Silence came gradually over me after my heavy breathing had subsided. I found my saddle of granite and settled in. My mind began to wander back over the last six months in Minnesota. The stress of dealing with Sharon’s mom. The satisfaction of long bike rides, trail runs, a complete rewrite of ‘Debris’ and other assorted writing projects. Coffee on the porch. Time well spent with the grandchildren, friends and family.

One of the beauties of traveling inside one’s head is that you never know where you’ll end up or what you’ll discover along the way. Gradually the feeling of melancholy subsided and I was able to fully embrace the bliss of my surroundings. Throughout the rest of the season I made it a point to always take some time to appreciate my surroundings. Truth be told, I had to go inside myself to find the peace outside.

When they were young I used to take my kids hiking in the woods. At a certain point in our trek I’d make them stand still and listen to the sounds that whirred all around us. “Listen to the stillness,” I encourage them, “because in that silence will be a world of sounds.  Of course, it didn’t stick at first. They got fidgety and distracted. But gradually they began to hear the birds, the wind rustling through the leaves, far-off sounds of traffic and of course, the all-encompassing sounds of silence.

I feel sorry for those folks who aren’t able to appreciate their surroundings in life.

Recently a friend of mine talked about his son who was feeling depressed. His son was 40 years old and hadn’t yet acquired a home of his own or met career goals that he had set up for himself. My friend reminded his son that his own children still had a devoted dad and attentive father. While it was true his son hadn’t accomplished what some of his college friends had and he wasn’t where he thought he would be at age 40, he could still be appreciative of his strong marriage, wonderful wife, good health and three devoted sons.

Another friend of mine goes on a yearly retreat at a Jesuit Center in the Twin Cities. It is a week of silence and contemplation and reflection. He loves it and has been doing it for 35 years. Quite a testament to the power of silence.

Then there are others I know who can’t appreciate their present day because they’re always focused on the future. It’s a little like the sign in a tavern: “Free Beer Tomorrow.”

Or others whose only disposition is to see dark clouds overhead instead of a life well lived and family members who support them.

To this day I can’t explain what happened that afternoon or why it took me so long to appreciate my surroundings. One good thing came out of it. I was determined not to let that happen to me once I returned to Minnesota in the spring.

So each morning I have my ritual on the porch. I stretch, arrange my coffee and iPad and notebook and then…nothing. I sit in my chair and listen to the sounds of the day awakening all around me. It might be birds at breakfast or singing in the trees or sailing overhead. It might be the wind pushing gently through my screens. It might be traffic several blocks away as commuters rush up Cedar Avenue to their destiny with their concrete cubicles.

 

There is also great comfort in trail running and sometimes getting lost in the woods and in my head. Eventually I find a way out and then back-track back to my car.

3 miles into a 4.3 loop, 30 degree incline, 85 degrees, high humidity,  water dripping off leaves and my nose, oh, yeah, pure bliss

 

To quote from a book on Buddhism: ‘So much of our lives takes place in our heads.’  Running through the woods, oblivious to everything around me, frees my mind to wander just as my rubbery legs are carrying me over hill and dale. Going nowhere in particular frees my mind to see the world, one’s surroundings and life in a new light.

Appreciation is a gift we’ve been given if we’re smart enough to recognize it and grasp it. It doesn’t cost us anything. All it takes is a little time to reflect on our good fortune no matter how challenging our lives might be or have been.

As the ancient philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius remind us, it’s not our experiences that form who we are but instead the ways in which we respond to them. In other words it’s the perspective we choose – not the incidents or life experiences themselves – that ultimately defines who we are. By stripping away the accoutrements of wealth and accumulation and success we can discover the pure beauty of life all around us.

Melanie has begun to have every family at the dinner table express one item of appreciation they experienced that day. It’s a wonderful yet subtle way to remind her kids that there is always something to be grateful for. Face it, kids tend to follow what we do, even more so than what we say. Daily reminders of appreciation become great fodder for their young, resilient minds.

The secret here is to find beauty and wonder even on an average day or as part of our routine lives. I could start to list my good fortune and it would be a long list. That despite the fact that there have been numerous losses, failures, stumbles and falls along the way. There were things that I accomplished along with many others that I didn’t. It’s a reflection on times past and opportunities lost. An appreciation for reconnecting with old friends while accepting the loss of other friendships that have faded away.

It’s the appreciation of what others have done for you. The ability to step out of your own little world and see it from another’s perspective. Understanding that being nice doesn’t hurt and being kind isn’t weakness. And saying ‘thank you’ isn’t an apology but rather acknowledgement of nice things others have done for you. Most importantly it’s realizing that while it is one thing to acknowledge ones blessing, it is sometimes entirely different to embrace it and appreciate it for what it is worth.

It’s an appreciation for my surroundings; both the beauty of the desert and the green of Minnesota. It’s passing on the gift of appreciation to my kids and grandkids. An appreciation for my life as it is…

and belief that it can only get better.

Gold Coast ... the Wild Coast

The Chinese have a saying that a journey begins with a single step. I’d change that a little to say a real journey often begins in naivety, progresses to actuality by accident and somehow finds its place in one’s memory bank through sheer happenstance, perseverance and dumb luck.

Like some wonderful party that can’t be replicated afterwards even if all the same participants gathered together, once again, at the same place; a journey is really a time capsule. It’s a sliver of space in one’s life that gives birth to either good memories or bad, to wonderful thoughts or sad reflections. Yet it always remains locked in that serendipitous turn of events which can never be changed, replicated or replaced. Whatever happened did happen. Whatever was gained can’t be changed even if it later becomes lost on in a fog of future events.

A few months ago, I reflected on my experiences in San Francisco in my blog “Young Heart by the Bay.”  A tiny fraction of that experience was a road trip I took back in the autumn of 1964.

It was my first real road trip.

The idea was born early one Sunday morning in some unnamed dive bar on North Beach.

We were a motley assortment of drugstore cowboys, fast food aficionados and one kid with two years of college under his belt. Each of us ruminating on about our pending release from military service a monumental two years away. This was long before “Easy Rider” and my own sojourn to Danmark.

What were we going to do after the service? Return to college. Head out for Europe. Stay in San Francisco or hit the road just like Jack Kerouac did in “On the Road.”

The more sober philosophers among us thought we should get on with our lives. We should go back home after our hitch was up, get an education, marry our college sweetheart and settle down to the good old standard American life. The more inebriated among us thought otherwise. Another round of beers and an impromptu survey was taken. The open road garnered first place with Europe a close second. Returning home to suburban tranquility didn’t even register.

Some of us were already open road desperados. One guy had a big-ass Triumph 650cc motor-cycle with enough horsepower to fly between San Francisco to Los Angeles in record time. He went down to the city of angels almost every weekend to see his girlfriend. That is until a transfer landed him in the middle of nowhere Indiana in a snowstorm and his bike went into cold storage.

A couple of guys had souped-up cars they’d brought to the Presidio from back home. But soon one fellow was shipped off to Vietnam and another got transferred to Okinawa. Several more wannabes disappeared when sobriety raised its ugly head. So that effectively took most of my gang out of the picture. I was the only one left with my Vespa motor scooter and exaggerated, romantic notions of the open road still spinning around in my head.

A dream had been ignited in my plastic brain that resonated throughout my body. I decided I might as well hit the asphalt right then and there instead of waiting another two years before my release was up. My destination would be the distant lands north of the Golden Gate Bridge. At that point, they were just shadowy mounds of gray that kissed the skyline outside my office window.

This was the old Northern California countryside before multiple ballot propositions changed the political and social landscape and a bulging San Francisco spilled its inhabitants far and wide; spilling out across the bay to once tiny hamlets like Sausalito, Mount Tamaulipas and Stinson Beach. A time when cows roamed empty fields amid gun emplacements that still protected San Francisco bay from Japanese battleships. An era, before satellites, when radar stations scanned the northern skies for raiders from Russia. A time when only a few small enclaves of new housing slashed into the green hillsides. A time when the only sound heard was the putt-putt of my tiny Italian engine against a wind blowing ocean-side and birds on high, floating silently in the sea breeze.

So one Monday morning, instead of heading to work at the Command Information Office, I saddled up my trusty stead, wrapped supplies on the saddle rack and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge for points north.

After I had braved the crazy traffic on the bridge, I swung north to the tiny enclave of Sausalito. Even back then Sausalito was a very special place. During the war, the Navy had installed a host of ship maintenance facilities. By the sixties those had all disappeared but a lot of the ship workers had stayed. They were joined by displaced beats and hippies from across the bay. Together they made Sausalito an eclectic community, a growing artist colony and home to the funky and weird.

I got my regular cup of Joe and sat on the dock, peering out across the bay back to my new life and home and I wondered where the road might take me next.

On the way out of town, I spotted this inlet where fancy cars were parked in front and yachts in back. It was a novel idea at the time, priceless in this day and age. 

 

Later that morning, I stopped at the Christian Brothers winery. I didn’t see any of my old high school teachers there but a couple of glasses of vino did wonders for the rest of my trip that afternoon.

The first sign of encroaching humanity. The pristine countryside of Sausalito was becoming just another suburb of San Francisco. 

Some rundown motel among the sequoias was my refuge for that first night. Exhausted, dirty and yet feeling exhilarated. Note the sleeping bag I had hauled along. What was I thinking?

This was one of dozens of inlets along the coast road where the sea had dumped its collection of driftwood and debris on land. I’m sure there were treasures down there but I never stopped to investigate

 

I was so tempted to ride down to this house to see who lived there. I can’t image a more remote, mysterious and wonderful place to live. It was probably some writer toiling on the great American novel and suffering the pangs of a broken love affair.

Back along the bay, I came across this new military housing complex being built. The view out their front door was to die for.

But more fascinating were the old World War Two defensive installations that ran up and down the bayside. A concrete collection of pillboxes, command centers and the foundations for large cannons which would have been pointed out to sea.

Then behind those old fortifications was a new radar facility and cameras pointed down at a kid on a scooter who was peering up at them.

Some of the dozen places along the coast where I was lost and didn’t really care. I had gas to go and wanderlust running rampant through my veins. 

By the end of the week, I was flying with wild abandon. Yet I only crashed once, taking a curve too fast on wet leaves and ending up in a gully sans my glasses, hat and pride. The scooter was OK except for the mud and leaves that coated its undercarriage with brown muck.  I found my glasses, picked the dirt out of my teeth and climbed back up on the saddle again.

During that week, one song in particular kept bouncing around in my head. “Four Strong Winds” by Ian and Sylvia. It spoke of loss, separation and the infinitesimal yearning for something better even if ‘it’ couldn’t be defined at the time. It’s a great song and still brings back a lot of fond memories.

After a week of meandering the bays and inlets, the back roads and tiny towns hugging the coast, I immerged out of a grove of redwood trees and found myself by some main artery that fed humanity back down toward the bay area. I used that as a beacon to head back south and my home.

The trip was soon forgotten and aside from being captured in some old color slides it became a fading memory that was soon overshadowed by a multitude of other life events including a traumatic trip home between transfers. Yet somehow those old slides followed me around for another forty-six years until a friend suggested I transfer them to digital.

ScanCafe released them from their cardboard sleeves and jogged a memory capsule in the back of my head. After gathering dust for forty plus years, those images took me back to a time when I was young and free and full of wondrous ideas and aspirations.

I realize now that during my trip I was living in the moment…what Buddhists all mindfulness. Today we would translate that as conscious living.  In his book “Wherever You Go There You Are – mindfulness meditation in everyday life,” author Jon Kabat-Zinn talks about mindfulness as enlightening and liberating work. “It is enlightening in that it literally allows us to see more clearly, and therefore come to understand more deeply, areas in our lives that we were out of touch with or unwilling to look at.”

I should ride a scooter more often.

My California coastal tour was the first of several road trips. That was then, this is now. I’m not much for road trips anymore. I guess I’m too impatient to get wherever I want to go. But back then, it was my first time skirting asphalt and concrete, tasting the grit and grime of the open road and opening my virgin mind to all kinds of possibilities. Some of which actually came true.

Life can be strange that way.