My dad used to have a badass ability that kind of drove me nuts, even as I envied it.
Dude could melt into the scenery like nobody was there. I swear I spent days of my life just looking for him in the woods, and I would walk right by him over and over and never see him until he wanted to be seen. I think it entertained him to see how many times I could miss him when he was right there.
I have never really had that ability. Oh, I could become invisible as a kid because I didn’t want to be called in, or as an adolescent because … well. Least said about that the better. But never like he could. He became, and there is no want for a better word, habitat.
He was no less and no more than the creek, or the trees, or the squirrels. His ability to connect with that deep something was uncanny, and I desperately wanted to learn it, but at the time, he didn’t have the vocabulary to express or explain it, and I didn’t have the focus and discipline to get it anyway.
But recently, an injury has opened a door that was apparently hiding behind the one that never quite got opened.
I have struggled with sciatica for decades, due to a nasty fall down some ice covered stairs in 1998. My tailbone was destroyed, hanging by a thread, and sometimes it decides to twist and you don’t even want to know the kind of pain that is. And a weather system recently caused that whole area to flare up big, and just when I started feeling something like normal again, I managed to ever-so-slightly rupture a disc at L5, and a whole new kind of fun began.
The pain is mostly over now, and the physical therapy is helping greatly. But the one thing that is becoming quite apparent is that, at least for the foreseeable future, I am a slow walker. Seriously, I try to go faster, and I get a pop-up that reads: “We’re sorry; that setting is unavailable at this time.” I used to sprint everywhere I went. If I had to go to a store, I would sprint in, bleem to what I needed, and GTFO ASAP. I would speed walk through the Costco, focused only on what I needed and never ever browsed or wandered about. And that’s really how I went through life generally.
I think it started when I started dating my (now ex) husband, who seems to have only two settings: full steam and full stop. There is no nuance. No meandering. No stopping to smell roses. He would set land speed records through museums. Hiking in the forest was a deadly workout with him. There was simply no slowing down, ever. And once you get into the habit of that, any slowing down at all seems agonizingly slow.
So when I would go for a walk I would walk as fast as I could comfortably walk. If there was something to notice, I would look at it over my shoulder as I powered by. I didn’t take the time to be aware of where I was, or what I was. I was just me on the trail walking as fast as I could to get my miles in.
Doing the exact opposite of what my dad was so insufferably good at.
It both amuses and infuriates me that it took a spinal injury to make me slow down and pay attention to Place. I have to stop from time to time even if there are no roses. I have the opportunity to sit and be an observer. And slowly, the awareness is growing within me of the felt-sense of my … habitatness. I am I, but I am also Park. I am part of the scenery for other parts of the habitat. I am an obstacle to power around. I am an area of blue stillness on the bench. I am a weirdo with one hand over her heart, talking to a tree with eyes half closed. And the more I relax into my slowness, the more habitatty I become.
And I am deeply aware that other people in the park are habitat, too – to me. I even name them. “Red-jacketed podcast listener.” “Sweat-shirted loud talker.” “Leggings-clad stroller-pusher.” “Stress-walking Zoom attendee.” To them, I am probably “Gray-haired strangeness.” But maybe I can become as invisible as my dad could be, and simply melt into the scenery, and they’ll never even know I’m there. I think I’m beginning to understand now how he did it.