The view from the hillside

How many layers do you see? Sky Meadows State Park, Virginia, Oct. 2024.

On my family's annual "hike" at Sky Meadows State Park this past October, my 3-year-old decided he did not want to walk.

Note my quotes around "hike." We are not talking rugged or taxing terrain. We're talking well-worn footpaths and a mild incline, with the greatest threat to our comfort and success being the still-warm cowpies cluttering the trail. This context meant nothing to my child. The minute we turned uphill, he wanted no parts of the adventure, which forced me to be the grownup—to balance carrying him for some intervals and leaving him to his own (whiny) devices for others. Permit him to be slow, I repeated to myself at each interval transition. Both of us need to learn we can survive it.

I have struggled mightily this past year with discomfort and impatience. With a one-two punch of my parent's illness and the death of my friend, not to mention many other losses and stressors scattered throughout, I never quite shook the feeling that all time is borrowed, and every night that featured a delayed arrival home from work or a 3-hour-plus kid bedtime only heightened my sense that my little life is slipping through my fingers. How can I be present and progressing at the same time? Do I have to switch between the two? Choose one? Let go of both?

In the face of this persistent agitation, I treated myself much like I treated my 3-year-old on our hike, with scant patience, vocal exasperation, visible irritation, soupçons of sympathy, begrudging support, and annoyed assistance. During the moments I needed carrying, I didn't make the rest easy or comfortable for myself. Then when I had to move, I complained and dragged my feet. Neither approach optimized either state, and all I felt was depleted.

Now on this hike, my child had reached his breaking point, and so had I. Unwilling to pick him up again, and fresh out of parenting ideas for further enticement, I grasped my last straw: "Hey, turn around and look at the view."

To my surprise, he did. For a few good minutes we both stood there in silence observing the partly cloudy fall day, the cool breeze, the thinning light, the transforming leaves, the inescapable and unmistakable odor of fresh manure. Then, to my even greater surprise, when the time came to turn back toward the trail, he began to walk on his own without comment or complaint.

I'll never know what gears turned in his little brain, but my hunch is that lifting his head to discover the view offered him perspective on why we chose to go uphill and what that choice afforded. As this year closes, I'm having my own moment to pause on the hillside, to take the long view over a tumultuous, grief-stricken, intimidating, joyful, grateful, exhausting, fast-and-yet-endless 12+ months where the highest highs and lowest lows are stitched together by parenting and writing doldrums. It too gives me the benefit of perspective, to notice more closely the moments where I had choices (and the moments I didn't) and to better understand the implications of which paths I ended up following (or not).

What do I see when I take in the view? I see the wavering space where my friend used to be. My parent's successful treatment and prognosis. Progress, recognition, and validation at my not-so-new-anymore job. Simmering frustration and resentment at my diminished free time and lack of writing movement, and with that, fresh resolve for my own boundaries. I see a cuddly 3-year-old who doesn't miss a trick and a thriving kindergartner who welcomes every opportunity to befriend squishy babies. Schedule-shifting days, interrupted nights, unpredictable and interminable weekends. Delightful experiences that show my family is growing up from 2:2 parent:kid coverage into a true unit of four. And I see a grieving, exuberant world that holds loss and joy with both hands, as it always has, as it always will, with me bearing witness through my own candle-flicker of a life.

Am I at the top of the hill yet? Not really. Not ever. Even during our real-life hike, our personal pinnacle was far from the highest or farthest point in the park; we just sat on a bench under a persimmon tree, catching our breath before wending (and whining) our way back to the car. That's more what my end-of-year feels like: not celebratory but accepting, accepting that I am in the midst of an uphill climb, that I can feel tired and peeved and exhilarated all at once, and that I am allowed to stop watching my feet and instead lift my eyes to where I am right now, wherever that might be.

 

Prayer #405: Perspective 

When I stare across the rolling hills, they first present as muted brushstrokes, broad and brown, pressed on a gray-blue canvas. No roads bisect them; no birds thread them. Nothing appears to deepen the view except, eventually, time—a lengthening, slowing time, a gaze held longer than is comfortable, muscles relaxing and vision widening, a time that moves each hill into its own plane like many canvases upright in a rack, with space enough between to learn that this one uses oil, this one gouache, this one a fine pencil, the lightest of lines but still there.

The longer I observe what I've encountered, the more I can articulate the layers in the view. No one painting hangs before me. Does one artist?

Amen.