Embracing Stillness: Lessons Learned Waiting at the Vet

This year I’ve gone to more vet appointments than I can count. I guess I could count them, flip back through calendar pages and tally up appointments for tests and surgery and treatments and more tests.

2019 led into 2020 with a day-after-Christmas cancer diagnosis for Jude, one of our two rescued racing greyhound littermate brothers. January 3rd his leg was amputated. That seems so long ago now. Those first days of the year, my working in the living room and bedroom by his side as he recovered.

Our furry family was made up of two sets of brothers adopted as pairs. This year all four of them have needed special appointments and Pepper is no longer with us.

I’ve lived with animals my whole life. I know that loving an animal also means eventually losing it. Past pets have gone blind, deaf, suffered from vertigo, severe allergies and crippling arthritis.

But oh boy, what a year this has been. Some years are like that. One challenge after another.

If we’re open, the challenging years can teach us a lot.

Last Friday I was sitting in an exam room at the vet, alone. Charlie had been taken for x-rays. I sat watching out the window, grateful I’d gotten the one room with a view. I’d brought nothing with me. No books or magazines or little projects. It was just me. Quiet. Still.

I noticed a robin in the crabapple tree just out the window. I haven’t seen many robins for a while now, not since they finished rearing their last clutch of young this summer. Occasionally I’ll hear one laughing and think, so, they haven’t left yet.

So many vet appointments involve waiting. When we had to drive the nearly two hours for specialist appointments I usually brought a book or two or my latest crochet project (the slowest progressing shawl I’ve ever worked on).

Last Friday I sat in the exam room, still. Quiet. Fighting back the swirl of worried thoughts. Pushing aside fear. Thinking about stillness. Thinking about being forced to sit without doing anything at all. It’s rare isn’t it? When do we allow the gift of stillness? True stillness? Freed from the need to be getting something done. Freed from the drive for productivity, accomplishment. Or, on the flip side, distraction, entertainment.

Maybe we practice meditation or mindful breathing. Both are hard. It’s hard to set aside all the DO-ing and be still. So often when we’re faced with moments of inactivity we’re quick to fill that time.

2020 has often been a year of forced inactivity. For all of us. The pandemic has made some of our pastimes impossible and rendered others more difficult. In some ways this year has been all about waiting. Waiting for it all to be over. The pandemic. The election. The social and environmental strife. I know we’re all struggling with it.

Sitting in the vet’s exam room, staring out the window, I let everything fall away for a bit. I slowed my breath and breathed as deeply as I could while wearing a mask. I noticed the autumn colors — trees, the far-off fields, those crab apples, that robin. And I felt, if not joy, then at least gratitude. For this life, messy and complicated and hard that it is. For my loving and supportive family. For the gift of sharing my life with animals. For my circle of sweet friends (a text away when I need them). For my art friends and blog readers and loyal customers. For being able to live a life with art and creativity at its center. For the magic of the turning seasons. For the last of the flowers in my garden and harvests that will carry us into the cold.

And for me. My person. Still and quiet. Removed, for a time, from distraction, from preoccupation.

Gratitude and Joy Lists needn’t be written down (though I think that helps, too). They can be felt. In our hearts, in our bodies, even. These quiet revelations often don’t last. But I’m hoping I’ll carry the lessons of stillness and gratitude into the coming days.

I’m hoping that you, too, have been able to find moments of stillness. Quiet. Peace. Gratitude. And even joy. Perhaps in the most unlikely of places.