Touching zero

Lessons from Alice

[posted from Tim's blog at www.touchingzero.com]

Rather than the usual Team Hodgson snow holiday lineup of myself and my two sons, David and Jonny, this year we took David’s girlfriend Alice with us…. and I wasn’t quite prepared for what Alice would end up teaching me!

Alice has never snowboarded before, so the first thing we did was to put her through a fast start ‘snowboard in a day’ course at Tamworth Snowdome. And she kept falling down…. and she kept getting right back up again. As David and I watched each fall with our hearts in our mouths, she just seemed to bounce back every time – still smiling. At this point I would have thrown the board across the slope! After the day, she announced, beaming, that she loved it… despite falling forward, backward and sideways more times than I could count.

She displayed the same tenacity on the slopes, despite receiving some of the largest bruises I have ever seen (and, she advised me, even worse on her hip), and having bounced quite nastily on her coccyx, resulting in the timely application of a lot of ice. By the end of the week her commitment and her ability to just keep going while bouncing around wildly and smiling broadly had resulted in her becoming a pretty damn good snowboarder.

The real fun – and the real lesson – was off the slopes though…. because every new experience was greeted with a whoop of excitement and childlike delight in experiencing something new. Whether it was discovering American breakfast, or wandering round a mall, or exploring the different products in a food store, or drinking in the view from a mountain… everything that she did seemed to be suffused with an incredible sense of excitement, discovery and exploration.

And for me, I realised how much I was taking for granted in my life – how much I had become cynical about. I started to notice the simple things in life – reconnecting with a spirit of playful curiosity. And as I did, I began to lighten up again – to wake up and smell the coffee.

Life is in the little things, the small details, the surprises , the beauty that we so often overlook. It’s in the joy that’s hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to notice it. It’s in every single moment of the day – if we just notice it. It’s in the delight of a smile, or the beauty of a flower. It’s in the beauty of a drop of rain, or the freedom of a leaf blowing in the wind. It’s a gift to each one of us… to be truly grateful for the world we find ourselves in. To revel in the experiences that we come across every day.

So, thank you, Alice, for reconnecting me to fun, and play, and curiosity, and laughter.