My (new) afternoon delight
Twice this week during my lunchtime “quiet hours,” I loaded my dog in the back of my car and drove to my favorite nearby park for a quick walk through the woods.
In midlife, my Goldendoodle, Finn, finds himself where many women at the same stage of their lives land – slightly chubby and in need of a workout plan. Since I started working full time seven months ago, my baby boy – who rarely gets snacks unless you count the occasional chicken breast he drags from a cutting board on the counter to devour on the TV room rug (which he did last week) – has gained weight. He stayed with my sister and his cousin, Daisy the Cockapoo, when I went away a few weeks ago and her dog walker reported that Finn was very well behaved but could stand to lose a few pounds. Sounds like one of my Yelp reviews.
Prior to spending my days coming up with compelling ways to write about hiring software, Finn and I went for long hikes a few times a week. He’d pull me up steep dirt trails and along the edges of the Raritan Bay with Manhattan looming in the distance and I am sure that today my right arm is slightly longer than my left due to all that dragging.
The problem with Finn is that he has become the spoiled and overindulged baby in the family. While I joke that my actual fourth and final human child is my baby and I want to carry him around in a Baby Bjorn and hug him all day, he hasn’t really had that precious of a life and behaves as such. He’s mostly had to figure a lot of things out for himself and is pretty self-reliant and would just as soon climb into a baby carrier as he would climb into my bed (something he’d do on the reg when he was a little guy). The upside of spending your formative years in chaos is quickly learning that if you want something done, it's easier to just learn how to do it for yourself rather than wait for someone to notice your raised hand.
Finn, on the other hand, believes himself to be an absolute prince and during the pandemic when his four siblings were living at home for many (many) months, he was never without someone to tend to his needs. There were laps for snuggling, willing playmates for the weird game he likes to play with a squeaky rubber ball, and somebody to take him for long walks. I drew the line when for a while he’d just sit in front of an open car door and wait for me to try to lift all 60 pounds of him into the backseat. None of my children is too good to get himself into a car of his own volition.
Here along the Jersey Shore, it has been an absolute stunner of a fall. At least it’s looked like that each afternoon out my office window. The temperatures have been pretty mild and the sky so blue and finally this week I decided to take advantage of my company’s generous 90-minute quiet hours and squeeze in a quick hike with my pup.
The timing was perfect on Wednesday because it gave me the opportunity to listen to the book my content team is reading together before our meeting that afternoon, and I walked along the trail feeling blissfully alone amongst the trees. During the pandemic and with nothing better to do, my woods had been teeming with interlopers and it felt like every five seconds, Finn was on high alert that another dog was approaching a quarter mile ahead. As overindulged and thus delusional in his grandeur and importance, Finn is incredibly alpha – despite looking like friendly a stuffed animal. If your (usually male) dog gives off the slightest whiff of feeling similarly macho, there’s often a lot of growling and posturing as we pass each other and honestly, it’s incredibly annoying and disrupts my peaceful woodsy vibe.
But on Wednesday, I passed only a few other hikers (blessedly without dogs) and when I finished listening to my allotted chapters for work book club, I pulled out my AirPods and tuned into the woods.
Later that night at my (absolute favorite) all-women 12-step meeting, I shared how I’d forgotten how connected I feel to the universe when I plug into nature. All my senses start to pulse when I find myself deep in the woods and I feel like I’m a part of my surroundings: the wind blowing the leaves back and forth, the wispy clouds streaked across the blue autumn sky, the loamy scent of earth and fallen leaves, the buck crowned with a small set of antlers standing in the middle of the trail at the top of a long incline. I walked along with the dog pulling to the side of the trail undergoing his own reverie as he visually hunted the squirrels and chipmunks hopping about the fallen leaves.
I told the women at the meeting that even though I have convos with God most mornings on my couch in the dark, where we chat about things I’m so grateful for and the strength I need to accept the things I can’t do anything about, it’s in the woods that I really feel a bigger presence.
It’s only when I get in the middle of all those trees that I remember how small I really am. How I’m just a bit player in this whole life we’re all experiencing together. Really, I’m no bigger or more important than the skittering chipmunks or bright orange leaves falling from the sky. I feel right-sized and connected to life, to myself, to you, to the tree that reaches so straight and tall above it all while its fat roots hang from the edge of the earth. I close my eyes and feel it all as my dog pulls me along the trail.
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SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy
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