Dan puts steaming bowls of muesli in front of the children, studded with dried fruit and almond butter, and they sling creamy bites into unusually quiet mouths. Rose licks her lips and announces, “There’s just one thing I don’t like about this breakfast.”
A thick fog of silence rolls across the table. Dan and I find each others eyes and exchange weary “here comes the inevitable” smiles. Rose has what we call an evaluative mind. Every experience, event or mental state goes into the hopper of examination and out clunks an opinion. These opinions become her GPS system, guiding her passionately toward what she wants (a sip of my coffee, endless playdates, mega-carbs, an expanse of sand on which to cartwheel forever) and away from what she doesn’t want (cooked vegetables, long family hikes, a speck of boredom).
Rose and I are out walking one of her regular clients, Jack the Scottie. She’s holding his leash in one hand, swinging my hand in her other. It’s bright and warm, and Rose bounces down the sidewalk with a levity that’s endemic to people who have never had to balance a checkbook or wrestle internally with whether it’s appropriate to do seminude cartwheels in front of your windows.
It feels like a green-light moment in which to unleash a little philosophical mom-ologue.
“You know, Rose, I’ve been thinking about how some people have a lot of desires; you know, things they want or don’t want. They have strong ideas about how they want things to be,” I pause to let this idea settle in the fresh space of her mind. Melted snow drips from conifer boughs and rooftops, plinking out a spring tune.
“Are you talking about me, Mama?”
“Well, yeah, you and me. And also, I’ve noticed that some people don’t have very strong preferences about how they want things to be.”
“You mean like Daddy and Col.”
“Right.”
“Well, yeah ... but it’s not good or bad,” Rose says, skipping forward to position herself under the corner of a roof, opening her mouth to catch the leaping water.
Hmm. I was about to deliver the punchline, the truth of how when we cling to our preferences, they bring suffering. How these desires, these expectations, are at the heart of our human pain.
But I pause, understanding that Rose is right. Having a storehouse of desires is neither good nor bad; it’s how we relate to them, whether we buy into them. And to be fair, while Rose will broadcast the changing weather of her wantings, she is simply reporting. It may sound like complaining, but it’s actually just her finely-tuned mind filtering through waves of sensory information. She’s often not actually asking for anything to change but simply setting the chittering birds of her consciousness free.
Here’s what Rose has taught me: The forest of desire is intense and wild, full of beckoning turquoise pony necklaces and parents instigating hikes with wolfish smiles. You can walk through it all feeling your muscles of greed and aversion flexing, and still, it’s not good or bad. My job is to click the safety on my own future anxieties, to remember to breathe while Rose is telling me how she Doesn’t Like This Hike We’re On, to not create more pushback by trying to convince Rose her opinions are wrong. Because she’ll need a lot of clearance to take off on this very hike, running under the blue sky, which she always inevitably does.
Rose drops Jack’s leash, issues a few grimy sidewalk cartwheels and comes up beaming. Watching her unbridled enthusiasm is like beholding a classical artwork, the kind that lodges in your heart and tells you something about the indomitable human spirit.
Reach Rachel Turiel at sanjuandrive@frontier.net. Visit her blog, 6512 and growing, on raising children, chickens and other messy, rewarding endeavors at 6,512 feet.
