Five Minute Walk That Took An Hour

08:28

Five Minute Walk That Took An Hour

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talks

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Meditation

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A five-minute walk with my sons took almost an hour. They stopped for a beetle, a feather, a strange leaf, an ant, and a tiny flower growing through a crack in the pavement. I kept telling them to hurry. I thought they were wasting time. Then I realized they were fully inside the moment, while I was already living half an hour in the future. They were not slowing me down. They were waiting for me to arrive. My new talk is called The Five-Minute Walk That Took an Hour.

Mindfulness Parenting Awareness Patience Anxiety Ram Dass Mindful Parenting Present Moment Awareness Future Anxiety

Meet your Teacher

Kingston, ON, Canada

Meet your Teacher

Kingston, ON, Canada

Transcript

Hey everybody, Jason here. So I just want to tell you a little story. So a while back I was out with my two sons. We were just going for a walk. You know, Just a little five minute walk down the road and you know, That was it. So. You know, Five minutes there, Five minutes back and that was it. So I had something I wanted to get done afterwards. So in my head, This was already, Uh, It already had like a schedule attached to it, If you know what I mean. And you know, I don't know if you've ever tried to walk anywhere with kids, But they don't give a shit about your schedule. They simply just don't. So we made it about 20 feet per se before one of them actually stopped because there was a beetle on the sidewalk or the road, Whatever it was. Now, You know, To me, It's really, It's just a beetle, But you know, A little black bug doing, You know, Whatever the hell I guess beetles do. But to my son, The thing was apparently the most important creature literally ever discovered. He crouched down beside it and he started asking questions like, Where's it going? You know, Does it have a home? Can it even see us? Does it know we're here? Uh, You know, Would it bite him? Uh, And of course, Could we keep it? Right. So I'm standing there and I'm looking at this beetle thinking, Buddy, There are probably 8 billion more of these bloody things. We really don't need to hold a, You know, A press conference every time we see one. So I tell him, You know, Come on, Let's go. We walk another 30 feet or so. And then there is the infamous feather, Right? Yeah, We've all seen it if you have kids. And then there's the weird looking leaf so we we stop and we look at the leaf right and then they find an ant carrying something and now we're following the ant right so we're physically moving in the opposite direction of where we're supposed to be at this point Plans? Yeah, They're out the window. And what do we do? I'm looking at the time and I'm telling them to hurry up. Come on, Let's move. We're taking forever. We don't have all day. You know all the regular bullshit stuff that we say as parents. So, I mean, That's how they saw it the whole time. All this regular shit adults say to children when children are experiencing the world incorrectly, Right? I mean, Are we doing it wrong or are they? I mean, A walk is supposed to get you from here to there. That's what walking is for, Right? Apparently the fact that we're outside together on a beautiful day with nowhere genuinely urgent to be was completely, Absolutely lost on me, Right? I decided that the point of the walk was the destination. And at one point, One of my sons was stopped beside like a crack in the pavement where a little tiny flower was growing. And I mean super tiny, Right? I would have missed it. You could have stepped on it and really never even knew it was there. And he's staring at this thing like he just found life on another planet or some shit like that. He says, I mean, How did it grow there? And I gave him, I guess, Some half-assed answer about seeds and rain and how plants grow in strange places. But he wasn't really asking for a biology lesson at all. He was amazed that something alive had come through the actual concrete. So you know I remember standing there. Still a little impatient and suddenly realizing that I'd walked past basically the same flower probably 10 times. Never seen it. I had technically, I guess, Been beside it and my body passed within a foot of it, But I hadn't actually been there, If you know what I mean. But my son and my sons, They were there. And I was already somewhere else. I was thinking about what I had to do when we got home. I was thinking about the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. They were just standing there on the sidewalk, Right? And I was living half an hour, Literally in the future. And then it kind of hit me, Right, That this is how really most adults live. We spend our entire lives trying to get to, I guess, The next part. And we rush through breakfast because we have to go to work. And then we rush through work because we want to get home. It never seems to end. I guess then we sit down and we scroll through our phones because apparently sitting quietly inside life is really, Really difficult and unbearable for us. I mean, We're always moving towards something. The weekend, The vacation, Retirement, When the kids get older, You know, When the mortgages pay or when we have more money, When things calm down. We keep trying to present like it's an inconvenience standing between us and our real lives. And I mean, For me, The fucked up part is that this is real life, Right? This bit, This annoying bit, The slow bit, The walk, The talking, It's too long. But most of life is not really made up of those things. Most of life is dishes and driving and waiting in line and looking for shoes and standing in the kitchen while somebody tells you a story you've already heard 16 times. Right Dad? Walking five minutes down the road with a kid who actually wants to watch an ant. That is where your life is. It's hidden inside all the shit you're trying to hurry through, Right? I mean, Ram Dass himself used to talk about being here now, And people turned this into a slogan. They put it on shirts, They put it on posters, On and on and on, Right? Be. Here. Now. Okay, So, But actually doing it is brutal, Absolutely brutal, Because the mind is always trying to escape whatever actually is happening. So, I mean, If the moment is actually painful, We tend to want out of it, Right? And if the moment is boring, We want stimulation. If the moment is beautiful, We start worrying about actually losing it. We barely let anything be what actually is. And I guess children haven't really fully learned that yet. They can still actually stop for a beetle. They don't need to walk to accomplish really anything. The beetle itself is enough, And the feather is enough, And the flower growing through the cracks is enough, And. . . I guess I realized something that day that I already knew, But I kind of just let it go. I wasn't waiting for my sons to finish the walk. They were waiting for me to actually arrive, Right? There's a difference, You know, Uh, They weren't really slowing me down per se. Uh, I was the one who wasn't there. And eventually we did get to where we're going. I don't even remember really what it was for. Whatever it seemed important at the time. I can't even remember what it was at all. But I do now remember the flower. I remember them crouching beside it. I remember the crack in the pavement. And I remember realizing that these little moments I kept trying to get through were the exact moments I would probably miss if they were actually gone. And I still forgot this. I mean, Of course I did. I still hurry them. I still look at the time constantly. I mean, This is one of the stories where I had a realization and became a perfectly present father. That's not it. And I ask myself now a simple question, You know, Where the hell am I actually trying to get to? I mean, Because whatever I think is waiting for me, I guess, Later, When I finally arrive there, It will still only be just another present moment, Right? Another moment that I can either live in sign of or I can try to escape. So I mean that five minute walk took almost an hour and at the time I thought my sons were I guess wasting time but looking back now I mean, I think they were really the only ones who understood what time was for. Thanks for listening. Namaste.