“You must learn one thing: the world was made to be free in.”

— David Whyte, “Sweet Darkness”

 

One October morning years ago, Zac and I sat in the orthodontist’s office while his older sister had her braces checked. Zac scraped his gray Birkenstocks on the rough carpet and rocked his chair’s sturdy legs back and forth. His deep brown eyes scanned the room again and again, over and over. Mostly he looked at the ceiling and thrummed his fingers. Out of his restlessness, he asked me, “Mom, what’s a metaphor?”

I explained the figure of speech and then gave him several examples: the moon is a face; your hair is a horse’s mane; your brain is a computer. He, creative and bright, offered some of his own: The car is a rocket ship; my memory is a hard drive; these green Umbro shorts are my signature.

Then he added that he also knew what a simile meant and rattled off a few 9-year-old colloquialisms: you’re as weird as a nerd; you’re stupid like an idiot.

As I later drove them to school, many similes and metaphors presented themselves. We passed a golden sugar maple ablaze against an azure sky, leaves falling as snow in a blizzard. Zac said he’d always wanted to see the actual instant a leaf leaves the branch.

In this moment, I knew I had a choice. Three years before, would I have hopped out of my Jeep on a busy morning to frolic in the foliage and get the kids to school maybe five minutes late? Probably not. I might have hurried along without noticing the paintbrush of fall. If Alisa or Zac had noticed the reds, yellows and oranges, I might have reminded them about the need to rush, about their responsibilities at school, about my need to get to Shop’n’Save. I might have judged as silly the idea of spontaneously teasing leaves from a tree.

I faced a choice: “Do I or do I not take the time right here, right now, to see if we can notice the exact second a leaf lets go?”

I put on the brakes. We got out of the Grand Cherokee and stood under the tree in its shower of leaves. We pounded our feet; the piles rustled and crinkled beneath us. Alisa and Zac laughed as they shook the limbs, and then jumped as they created a heavier downpour. To show me again that he understood metaphor, Zac said, “Mom, it’s a tornado.”

I am sure that this one tiny awakening benefited us all. We learned more about metaphor than its use as a literary tool. In our sunlit togetherness, we learned that, like Indian summer and the crisp air, the fleeting moment would pass, soon be gone. We learned to pause, even briefly. We learned a bit about freedom and where joy resides.

As I reflect on this one experience of living totally in a 1991 moment, it stands out among the many I have had in the following decades. It was one of the first in which I made a conscious choice, teaching me, teaching them, how to stop, look and listen. For a few seconds, we captured the brilliance of autumn. Playing like this might indeed seem silly, stupid, or weird. But our romping, creative and bright, brought us alive. And, as Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman tells us: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what brings you alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Susan Lebel Young is a retired psychotherapist, teaches mindfulness, yoga and meditation, and is the author of “Lessons from a Golfer: A Daughter’s Story of Opening the Heart.” She can be reached at:

sly313@aol.com.

 

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