Bow-Wow Now

It can be painfully slow.

As we say, use a calendar not a stopwatch. 

I have the wonderful honor of dog sitting this week for the owners of a Shiba Inu. Like any walker of dogs, you get to know their personalities rather quickly. She has her quirks, some in stark contrast with the usual band of labs that I oversee on a regular basis, with one characteristic standing out from the common most. 

It seems to me, that she has mastered the art of the here and now, with an uncanny ability (again admitting the possibility of ‘projecting’ ) to so focus and be in the moment that what would normally be a twenty minute out and back exercise trot with one of the Labs, takes us, well, as long as it takes us. Because she stops, pulls back on the leash, and thoroughly inspects whatever happens to share the same spatio-temporal GPS with us. With so much attention to whatever is there, that we sometimes take less than ten steps in ten minutes. Because there is a lot there don’t ya know. 

So I play along. 

This morning she considered a ripe blackberry and I downshifted into walking meditation mode in order to accommodate. Time passed and the flow continued as a caterpillar started its road-crossing quest. I could almost hear her attention scream ‘OMG a caterpillar, would you look at this?’. 

So I looked. 

And in looking found more. Lots more than my ‘hardened by society’ concept of hyper-swift assessments at a thousand miles an hour, in real time, managing stresses, options and responsibilities with cell phone in overdrive and blood pressure rising. There is a message here I finally understood. Decode. Decipher. Download. 

Stop, slow down, smell the blackberries and admire the soon to be butterflies. 

Sure there are a hundred items on my to-do list this weekend, but hurrying thru them, denying each its proper place, detailed attention and relaxed focus creates nothing but more items on that list. Fix what you fixed. Then fix it again and blame it on bad engineering or Taiwanese nails. 

We have talked about this in other posts, most notably as it relates to motorcycle maintenance, creative writing, music, spinning, swimming, cleaning, cooking and bike racing. In order to succeed they each require practice, focus and execution. Prepare, engage, flow. I am so reminded of this overtime I ride. I did five indoor 2x20 sessions this week as well as three HIT sets. Each one has a specific demand, but the steady-state, sub-threshold rides in the PowerBarn always seem to ask for just a little more, something extra, from the combination of head, heart, lung, leg and the often missing component of soul, in other words, the complete package. Everything. Not as in all-out, everything you got, but as in stay present, engage with your discomfort, look for efficiency, breathe, relax and find the flow type of everything.

Or what my teacher today on the other end of the leash might call The Now.