The Same Walk

 

I walk my dogs every morning.

Rosie, our German Shepherd mix, approaches these walks with the seriousness of someone conducting a very important investigation. Benji, on the other hand, appears to be operating under the assumption that every mailbox, telephone pole, and suspicious-looking leaf belongs to him.

Between the two of them, we’re lucky to make it around the block before lunch.

We generally take the same route. Same houses. Same trees. Same cracks in the sidewalk. Same neighbor who somehow manages to have his garbage cans at the curb three days before garbage day.

I have questions.

But the other morning, something caught my attention.

A little patch of flowers growing along someone’s fence. Nothing spectacular. No elaborate garden. Just a handful of small flowers, doing their thing in a place I’d walked past hundreds of times.

I stopped to look.

Rosie was delighted. Benji was less impressed. Apparently, we had an appointment with a fire hydrant.

I wondered how long those flowers had been there.

A week? A month? Had they been showing up every year, patiently waiting for someone to notice?

I had absolutely no idea.

And then I started wondering what else I’d been walking past.

Not just on my morning walks.

In my life.

The funny thing about getting older is that you begin to realize how much of the world you’ve already made up your mind about. You settle into routines. You develop opinions. You decide what’s worth your attention and what isn’t.

And occasionally, a handful of flowers reminds you that you might not know nearly as much as you think.

I’m discovering that life offers little surprises when I’m not particularly looking for them.

Sometimes it’s something one of my children says over breakfast. Sometimes it’s a conversation with someone at work. Sometimes it’s sitting quietly in church, trying to pray, while my brain insists on reviewing everything I forgot to do yesterday.

And sometimes it’s two dogs reminding me there’s absolutely no reason to rush past a perfectly good tree.

I’ve spent much of my life trying to figure things out. Finding answers. Making sense of things. Deciding what everything means.

Lately, I’m becoming more interested in simply noticing.

A child’s laughter from another room. The way the morning light finds its way through the kitchen window. Someone holding a door open for a stranger. The sound of the house before everyone wakes up.

Things that have probably been there all along.

I suspect God has been trying to teach me this for a while. Probably with the patience of someone who has repeated the same instructions to a student about seventeen times.

I’m getting better at listening.

Slowly.

The other morning, after admiring those flowers, we continued our walk. Same street. Same houses. Same familiar neighborhood.

Nothing had changed.

Except I was looking around a little more.

And Benji?

He finally got to his fire hydrant.

Apparently, he’d known where the important things were all along.