Tango - In the zone
By DelMio Editor
March 18th, 2008 | Leave a comment
My daughter is now 15 months old. My wife is entering her final year of grad school. I work a full-time job, and spend about as much time outside of work on other work, plus everything else that a 15-month-old daughter and a wife and a house require.
I have closets full of notebooks full of to-do lists and an Outlook task list that stretches for gigabytes.
I work a lot, and spend a lot of my time thinking about the future. And deadlines. And if my laptop is charged and the balance of Mira’s college savings fund and my own student loan payments and the gas bill and e-mails I have to write and we’re out of sippy cups again and did we pay day care this week?
In short, I spend most of my time planning. It’s a rotten disease, one that takes over your life. I can count on one hand the times in the past few months that I have actually been able to be what the gurus call “totally present.”
I read a story a while back that talked about surfers and nuns who would reach a state of Nirvana when, respectively, riding waves or praying. It seems that your brain always sends out signals to the body, asking, “Where are you? What’s going on?” And then your body responds, “On the sofa. Watching football.” Or, “In the car. Stuck in traffic.”
But in the case of the surfers and nuns, they would reach a point where their brains were sending out the signals, but getting nothing back. The body was so focused on the board or God that it wouldn’t respond to the brains questions. And so a loop forms, and the brain doesn’t know where it is. This is called by laypeople an out-of-body experience, or something the sports folks call being “in the zone.”
But sitting in a cramped Continental flight to Chicago, reading Tango, made me realize that, even though I don’t surf or wear a habit or even tango dance, I can take the time to appreciate the things around me when they’re around. Because they won’t always be, and neither will I.
