Skip to main content

Enjoy the ride

I was seven years old and it was my first recollected trip to Disney Land with my two brothers, Danny and Davey, ages 5 and 9 respectively.  My younger brother, Danny, and I were joined at the proverbial hip, mouths hanging slightly agape, eyes filled with wonder, mouse ears and an overload of color.  My elder brother Davey, wanted to ride Space Mountain, a ride that was no doubt thrilling for him but filled my younger brother with a belly rumbling sense of dread.   Danny and I were safety harnessed into what felt like our doom and a large bar was lowered and latched in front of us. We sat hands gripped, white-knuckles exposed, breath faltering.  Danny was expressly terrified and I worried over his response to our impending end.  My older brother sat in front of us, grinning broadly, hungrily ready to set off.  The ride jostled forward at what seemed like a break-neck speed and Danny clung to my arm, screaming with ear splitting terror.  I tried to comfort him over the next several minutes while he predicted our inevitable doom and our older brother yelled back at us that we were "gonna go upside down and flip soon".  To which Danny wailed louder and tried to crawl into the base of car in an effort to attain safety.  I tried to assure him that was an unwise choice considering our speedy descent into the bowels of hell.  I was holding him, breathlessly assuring him that Davey was surely lying and we were not  actually scheduled for death at this early hour of life.  It was the worst ride in recorded history.  When we rolled to the finish, Danny stopped crying took a deep breath and announced, "THAT WAS AWESOME!!! LET'S DO IT AGAIN!"  I stared in disbelief and almost throttled him on the spot.  I would have had I not been too busy nursing an ulcer and brushing back my newly acquired grey locks.
I think about that day often.
I think life is like that ride sometimes.
We have a choice.  We can scream and be miserable.  We can control or try to comfort.  We can gag back terror OR we can just throw our arms in the air and ENJOY the ride.
WEEEEEEEEE!
The choice is ours.   The ride doesn't change but our experience is drastically altered by the quality of our engagement.

Comments

ProfoundAlchemy said…
How exciting.
Seems I didn't care at an early age.
Carrying a bit now.
Really caring
January 25, 2014 at 5:35 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...
4 comments
Read more