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Curves in the Road

© Katherine E. Rabenau

Snow like white shade on naked trees
Lakeside beauty: Cold. Clear. Still.
And I sit here angry and sad
Not knowing why I am ready - but unable - to cry
Grey kitty howls my blues for me and I scold her
She is demanding my attention
Not just to her but to myself
She is smart this old grey girl
Her twenty years of life have taught her a thing or two
More than my fifty-four have taught me, I'm afraid.
So I scowl at her instead of crying
Tell her quite unkindly to "SHUT UP!"
Then go back to what I do worst and best
Feeling restless and lost and rather sorry for myself
Outside the wind blows snow off the trees
And the twenty mile an hour curve sign
Is blurred through the glass
But makes me think that maybe there's a lesson here
I'm wanting to race past these feelings that are coming up in me
These emotional sharp curves
When what I really need to do is slow down and take heed.
~ Katherine Rabenau

Well, just when you get comfortably speeding along a nice straight stretch of road, the needle easing up to sixty-five, the car feeling steady and sure in your hands, along comes one of those sharp curves. At least that's very true in the part of the country where I live. And of course it's true in life. Things start going smoothly and you begin to breathe easily and relax and suddenly - Whoop! - some unexpected thing happens to throw your life into disarray, to slow you down and force you to look again at where you are going, and most importantly, at where you are.

Although I really do still love it, one of the things I don't like about my new role of being a driver is that I can't watch the scenery like I used to do when I was a perpetual passenger. It's really a shame, too, because the part of the country I'm living in right now is incredibly beautiful. It continues to be rich in wildlife. Deer are everywhere. I haven't seen any bears myself, but they are around, along with foxes, coyotes, and other wild life. The lake across from my window has thawed and there is an abundance of birds here right now - loons, ducks, seagulls (!), and last week, we even had eagles fishing in the lake. Awesome.

But back to my driving analogy. I think that sometimes in life we get so focused on the road, especially the curves in the road, that we forget to stop and look at the beauty around us. We live as though the road were all there is and we only stop to rest and sleep so that we can get back on the road again in the morning. We view (well, I do) those nasty, exciting bends in the road as inconveniences or threats, rather than windows on the wonder of the world around us. We dread the bends in the road rather than wondering expectantly what's around the next curve. We mutter at having to slow down, rather than breathing a sigh of gratitude for the miracles of change and the unwritten magic of life. I think this is true of us as a society and probably particularly true for agoraphobics. We are master projectionists. We live most of our lives either in the past or the future and very little of it in the moment we are in. We hang out in the company of our sad pasts and our dreaded (or soon-to-be-perfect) future, eyes always on the road ahead and the threat of tail-gaiters behind us, never looking around at the beauty - and yes, even chaos has beauty - that is in the present moment.

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