Around the lake where our group walks the road almost curled up from the last two weeks of ninety plus heat. The lake itself sits still and exhausted from evaporation, and the ducks are hunkered down in the shade because it is cooler there than in the water. I feel sorry for the high school football players who are withstanding several practices per day. There is almost no amount of the wet stuff you can pour down your throat to offset being encapsulated in full football gear. During practice back in the day, I fainted dead away on the forty-yard line and sat straight up like a cornstalk when they put the smelling salts under my nose. But this kind of humid weather is a time when we protect ourselves with funny hats as wide as a Humvee. Normally, we are more self-conscious, but not so when the sun beats the tacos out of you from all angles.
So, when our BBRR group took our walk today, we sniffed the cooler air like it carried the smell of a freshly baked cookie. Electrolytes were up, the breeze floated through our shirts, and except for the story of a hawk that is threatening to eat a neighbor’s poodle, conversation was light. And speaking of conversation…
One of my favorite parts of this walking club is the way we share dialogue. Normally in a group, it can be sticky when you make your passage between the chit and the chat, or between one subject and another. There is an art to small talk, an art that some people navigate socially better than others. If, for example you are listening to a long-winded person who is explaining the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, it is difficult to interrupt them without the fear that they may start completely over when you return to the topic, starting with Chapter One: Homo Erectus Man and His Rise to Ambulation. However, in our group, we don’t have to worry about that. We shift lackadaisically around like a herd of grazing sheep, without any goals, itinerary, or past minutes to read back. We interrupt each other, complete each other’s sentences and then, half-hour later, we become Bon Qui Qui and say: “Is that what you had said?”
This is a wonderful retirement luxury I call driftiness. Nothing anyone is doing is anything they have to do. We are now doing things either because we love it or because we feel this is where our service would be best spent. In either case, the driftiness is the ultimate blessing, especially if you have observed the events of last week ranging from catastrophic Hurricane Ida to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Thankfully, we are not held up in a shelter waiting for a ration of bottled water or looking over our shoulder at an oncoming tank. We are relatively safe, reaching out in our own way, be it caring for the elderly, volunteering at a local hospital, or on mission for a recovering alcoholic. Our conversations and our walks may drift, but our hearts are powerfully directed to someone who is worse off than we are.
I hear stories of buying travel campers, of learning a new skill like dancing, of buying a new boat, but for us, those things come and go. They are the embellishments, part of the drifting. The steadiness comes from the more serious talks, those that include the enriching experiences that are carving a deeper path into our days. Author Gordon McDonald calls this the life happening “below the waterline.” As most of us approach our seventies, our bodies don’t have the flashy accoutrements we used to have. We have some worn parts, we have things that need replacing, we have some squeaks, some rustles, some blips and blemishes. But below our waterline, real work is still being done, and we are walking the deeper talk.