Crosswinds and sunlight

Monday with Margie was a delight. I went to her apartment; we meditated for a while and talked about her daily routine and how she might build meditation into it. She told me, laughing, “I always thought meditation was about having to empty your mind, which I could never do. But what I’m getting from Sylvia Boorstein is that you can just let your mind do what it does, right?”

Right. 

“You give yourself permission to pay attention. You can be a witness to your mind’s habits and your mind’s nonsense, and to what’s going on in your body while your mind spins and wheels around as it does. I thought it would be boring, but it’s actually interesting.”

Brava, Margie! 

We had a perfect-weather morning, a bit blustery but sunny and almost warm, and she felt terrific, so we walked eleven blocks, to a more distant coffee shop than our usual. All the way she leaned into my right arm, her cane tapping in rhythm with our steps. She showed me another iPhone photograph she made—the triangular shadow of her legs and her cane on a sidewalk littered with red tulip petals. Wonderful. She wanted to hear more about my years in southern Africa, so she asked questions, and I talked more than I listened. At the end of our time she insisted on walking back alone to her apartment building. She scoffed at my offer to walk back with her, “I do this every day! I love to walk. I’ll be fine.”

I watched her make her way down the sidewalk, a small, fragile ninety-three-year-old body, thin white curls lifting on the wind, cane angling away, and I stopped myself from running to catch up with her. Margie walks through our city all the days of the week, and that’s part of what keeps her alive and sharp. That and some indomitable DNA that migrated with her parents to the Bronx from a shtetl in Russia.