Paying Attention

It takes a child to help you notice things again. As Anne Lamott explains in Bird by Bird, having a baby can give you what writing can give you "it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up." For the G the simple act of washing his hands, the most mundane of tasks, is an act of sheer magic. He turns the faucet on full throttle, amazed that he can control the jet spray, turns it off, turns it back on again. "That's enough water," I tell him. Ok, ok we're all done, I want to say but he is already rubbing more soap between his hands ready to watch the tiny bubbles pop between his fingers. In my own mind, I'm already off to our next destination but he's not he's present in this moment awakened to every little bit of it. It's really on our walks to the park where I have learned the most from my little observer. "Come on, come on lets get there," I'm saying, grabbing his hand to coax him along. He untangles himself from my grip and within seconds is in a squatting position. "Look at dat mama" he points to a mess of ants drowning in someone's spilled latte. He grabs a stick and makes ripples in the puddle, the ants climb aboard and he giggles. A few of them that he has saved are now carrying bread bits across the cracked sidewalk and now the two of us are squatting over them. Just a few feet ahead, he is pilfering rocks from the neighbor's garden shoving them by the handfuls into his pockets and then into my pockets. This rock looks like coal the train carries, this one a big letter o, he explains. Next, he finds a graveyard of dead dandelions, picks them one by one and furiously blows them out as if they were candles, launching them into the sky in a big puffy cloud. "See you, see you" he waves to the seeds spinning away. I keep looking up ahead at the entrance to the park, I can see it now. "Hurry G we won't have much time to play on the monkeybars." Now its a bumblebee that has his attention, he watches the petals of the flower rattle and shake like a mini earthquake as the clumsy bulbous body extracts the nectar from the corolla. Ten minutes pass and he is still holding his knees in his arms fascinated with this hungry little bee and now I'm right there with him wondering just like him, "What's she doing? and where's she going?" I don't know much about bees except that they are caught up in the mess of pollination so I tell him we will have to read all about them when we get home. We don't ever get to the park this day like so many days... I have grown to learn it is in the getting there and savoring every rock, petal and flying creature.