Follow Your Nose and Your Bliss

I went hiking last Saturday with eight strangers, a very real experience made possible by the virtual ties that bind us.  A group called The Mountaineers just puts a bunch of adventures on the website and you sign up, show up, and hope for the best.  Sounds like online dating from what I’ve heard but I’m sorry, that whole scene is just way too creepy for me, whereas a day in the mountains with random outdoor nerds you don’t need to kiss or impress, well that’s just a walk in the park.

One guy was the CEO of some company that does “tech enterprise infrastructure” which could be brain surgery or espionage for all I know, but he was wearing a watch-like gadget the size of a grapefruit and positively crowing – in a happy geek way – about how this thing tracked his every heartbeat and had maps, compasses, data and maybe meatloaf recipes or something.  Thing is, while he was looking down at his monster watch he wasn’t looking up at the trees. Maybe he’d go home and watch the video of what he just missed.

He offered to email me info on this thing, not knowing, I guess, that I’m the broad who still wears clothes from college. 

“Dude, thanks but no,” I said as we climbed up a sweet -smelling trail, “I’m happy my heart beats but I don’t need the details, and I never quite know where I’m going but somehow I manage to get there.”

My son Billy used to say, “If I knew where I was going, I’d be there by now,” and as for me, I live the best line from Alice in Wonderland: “Where am I going? I don’t quite know.  What does it matter where people go?”

My guru for living the wandering life is my former dog and always soulmate Chopper, just a hundred pounds of dumb love.  He’d trot through the neighborhood and it was like Jesus or the Pied Piper or something.  Little kids would run out of the house and up their driveways, “It’s Chopper! Chopper’s here!”  And of course, my dog would smile and do that coffee-table-clearing wag of his tail, loving all strangers and smells. Seems I’m really a black lab trapped in the body of a 60-something female who still doesn’t know east from west, although I vaguely remember something about where the sun rises and sets. Growing up in Philly who cared about directions?  Just follow the signs on the expressway and point your car to the beach. Not so in the Wild West.  The first time a rancher took me out to help gather cattle in Nowhere, Colorado he dumped me on a hillside with a horse and a dog and said:

“Go gather them heads from the arroyo and bring ‘em east.”

Seriously? What the fuck was he even talking about? What’s an “arroyo” and whose head is in there? But there was no time for questions and he roared off in his F-350 diesel truck, a perennial snarl on his face.  Rancher Jim – not his real name even though I’m pretty sure he’ll never read my blog – was a fearsome presence. When we’d show up at dark thirty in the morning for a breakfast of grits before work he’d stomp into the kitchen and you could feel his family’s collective shiver. He was ornery and miserable but I called him “Princess” as in Yo Princess, what’s up?  The first time I did this his kids damn near lost all body fluids but after a while they had to subdue their delight.  Jim let me get away with this. I’m not sure why.

On that rocky hillside with a mare named Thunder and Gus, a wiry dog the size of my shin, I was lost as a baby calf but so happy to be living my goofball dream of being a cowgirl. I’d watched Gus herd cattle and it was something to behold – this tiny angry heeler with his hair on fire, nipping at the heels of a 2,000 -pound bull, not taking no for an answer. Being small, you can move fast and get away with a lot (like the “Princess” thing I guess). I hopped on Thunder’s back and hoped to God or whatever that she knew east from west. Gus led the way, we found the herd and pushed them east.  Well, the horse and dog did the work.  I was just window dressing.

So, when offered a machine to strap on my wrist for data I defer, relying rather on my six or seven senses – the usual five plus my common sense and intuition – and it all seems to turn out fine.  After having cancer, I decided to listen even more closely to my body and let it tell me what’s good or bad, right or wrong, north and south – and try it - it works! For instance, whenever I’m looking for a job, which is almost always, if the title or job description makes me weak and tired I DELETE immediately. If a headline makes my stomach churn I won’t look at it and obviously, I can’t watch Trump because I’ll throw up. Somebody invites me to something, I wait a nanosecond to see how it feels before I yay or nay.  Easy peasy.  What the body says, goes, period, and like Chopper I’ll just keep following my nose and trusting my gut, although admittedly he made some really bad food decisions.

It’s fun to evolve into this deep-down trustworthiness in your own fabulous self.  What if you really listened closely to channel your Inner Chopper? I’m mean, the only path for Chopper is the one that leads to happiness; and he lived on that path because he didn’t know about paychecks and buying stuff, changing the oil in the car or finding daycare.  He didn’t even have pockets to put shit in and as for “relationships,” he was station WLOVE – all love, all the time.  He just trusted in the okay-ness of everything and knew that love would carry the day.  He followed his nose and it led to his bliss, every dang day.

You can talk yourself out of anything with the same old script (“He/she will be so angry!” “I don’t have the money,” What about my career,” “My parents won’t like it,” blah blah blah), but you’re losing ground when you do that, looking at the data and not the trees. What smells good? What makes your heart sing, your chest expand, and your feet jump for joy? 

That. Just do that.