About Showing Up 

The scene for this week's blog was taken at a wellness center/ emergency care facility near me. The campus is designed with native prairie plants and water features which are distributed along various walking paths crisscrossing the facility.  For a place whose mission is health and wellness, their design for the exterior aligns well with their work occuring inside the walls.  Just walking from the parking lot to the front doors begins a subtle process of refocusing the mind.

I am starting to write down a set of concepts that I believe are marker buoys for my life. I chose to do this because a guy at my age should be able to articulate their learnings from the good and bad within a lifetime. One of the concepts on my list has to do with showing up. Life is more satisfying and meaningful as I learned to show up and be a particpant.  This means actively showing up to support family and friends as a means of supporting their choices in life.  This can take the form of cheering for the grandkids and other little ones as they run the bases at a baseball game, saying a word encouragement to a teenager experiencing the dumps, or offering congratulations to say "atta boy" when a promotion or milestone is achieved. It can meaning actually showing up to meet with a someone during a time of need not necessarily to commiserate or grieve but just to simply be with them. The point is to be there physically as much as possible.

This week I learned that showing up can also be applied to yourself.  I'm not sure that I understand the trendy terms of mindfulness or meditatation.  I like to think of this experience as finding quiet moments when they occur.  During these moments, I don't think about anything, but I am just there to be still, listen and see.  I just show up.  

This photo was taken at the scene where my quiet moment occurred this week.  At the time, I didn't even consider photographing it.  It was after those quiet moments had passed, I thought about taking the photograph as a way to help me remember this simple part of my very ordinary day. 

Taken with:

13 year old Olympus OMD EM5 and Sigma mft 60mm f2.8.