I must have fallen asleep with the television on and heard it while I slept, because I realized, taking my morning shower, that Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying” was playing over and over in my mind.
I’ve said here before that I’m in an apartment complex for the first time in my life, and it’s not quite true. I actually lived in one for a few months during my parents’ divorce, when I was eleven. Then, for a summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, I stayed in a small, pre-fabricated employee complex in the almost jungle near where they were cutting a swath for a golf course at a beach resort in South Carolina. Wild boars rooted through our garbage during the nights. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in a boyfriend’s apartments (he had a few, over the years), during my latest teens and early twenties, which was a very good thing.
Here, in the morning and the evening, most days, a ten year old, blind, spitz-spaniel mix named Daisy, takes me for a walk around this small complex, hidden in a forest by a busy street that is still mostly residential, on the north slope of a small ridge above a major creek. When Daisy and I walk across the parking lot and up the ten or twelve extra long pebble and board steps to the cleared landscaped knoll with the bench swing and the gas grill, I can look down the other side towards the creek, above the dam that makes the little lake behind our apartment, and see through the trees a large Catholic school, which two of my family members attended. I work from ten to six, or some semblance thereof, and when I walk Daisy at nine in the morning, I can hear the school bells play their little melody, marking the familiar change of classes down below.
I try not to hurry but to relish the time, when we’re taking our morning walk, and this particular morning, with McGraw‘s musical imperative as mental background music, I took some time to think about being in the moment, and living in a state of joy and gratitude for each intangible gift, and the concept of being consciously steeped in a spirit of generosity came into my mind (perhaps something else I was fed by the television playing through my sleep?). It made me think of Wayne Dyer, whose books I haven’t read, but whom I will stop to watch for a few moments when I surf by his self-help programs broadcast on PBS. I remember once hearing him speak of living in a “perpetual state of gratitude,” and I believe he’s onto something, and that generosity, and I don’t mean the material kind, and gratitude, are closely linked. It is, after all, the big trick, isn’t it? We’re always so concerned with our problems, and those of the people closest to us, when, in fact, that’s the meat of the meal, which we allow ourselves such little time to enjoy. The hard stuff is a big part of the beauty of life, and it is most certainly what makes us wise and living through it and learning from it brings us peace. I was reminded of the teachings of Reverend Edward Murray, S.M., a Catholic priest of the Marist order whose presence in the world I greatly miss, who helped me see the “faults” of others, not in a blaming way, but in a geological sense, as their broken places, their cracks in the rock, and taught me to do so, on the best days, without anger or judgment, or at least to try.
This particular morning, as Daisy and I strolled towards the apartment after our circuitous walk to the knoll and back, I passed a small stand of pines between our entrance to our building and the building closest to us. It had rained hard, with thunder and lightening, the previous afternoon and then woke us, pouring and booming again, during the night, but the sun was shining through about a dozen pines and steam was drifting softly from their bark.
Now, my youngest son, almost seventeen, has become the first person in our family to take an interest in country music, and he’s programmed a number of local country stations into our car radio. Heading to work, after that walk, I approached our job site, and my cozy trailer beside a massive landscape of mountains of ground concrete and foothills of tangled extricated rebar overlooking gigantic gaping holes in the ground. Running through the channels, I stumbled across Brad Paisley’s “Mud on the Tires” and laughed, as I pulled into work, when he sang:
And then with a little luck we might just get stuck
Let’s get a little mud on the tires.
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