My heart is a muesli bar

June 3, 2014  |  ibrainmapadmin

I’ve been cranky lately. A lot of pain in my face makes me cranky. Yeah I know it’s not very enlightened. But when I’m stuck in the pain I forget what works. I just drop into my miserable, sort of like an out of tune version of “Les Mis,” with some comedy that isn’t funny. It’s in black and white too. A few characters from Macbeth, no maybe King Lear (that’s me), wander in randomly from stage left to speak their lines, “out damned spot,” “to be or not…” (Yes I know that’s Hamlet, it’s a metaphor not a literature test).

You get the picture though? That’s my inner world at the moment. And all because of some pain in my teeth that refuses to leave. Like rats in the basement. Well I don’t have a basement but if I did there’d be rats.

Anyway I went to the dentist again yesterday. The offending tooth has been extracted, only the pain remains. So it really is all in my head! See what I mean about bad jokes?

Anyway after the dentist I went to the supermarket to get some yoghurt and bananas, a bit of a staple for sore teeth in my household.

I found a short line at the express counter. But a young man-boy ahead of me was holding up the line because the small bottle of OJ and a muesli bar had already gone through the checkout before he discovered he didn’t have enough to pay for both. This seemed to confuse the guy behind the checkout who frowned while he undid and then redid the small order.

While the woman ahead of me put her stuff through the checkout I watched the man-boy walk through the car park towards the bus shelter. He was easy to spot because he was wearing a green beanie and was tall. He looked like he’d had a growth spurt recently, like a 12 month old Kelpie pup, and his long limbs hadn’t filled out yet. Then he disappeared.

When I got to the counter I picked up the abandoned muesli bar and added it to my small pile. It felt substantial.

Then I walked across the car park, following the trajectory of said man-boy in green beanie, the opposite direction to my car.

When I got to the bus stop people were herding across the pavement and crowding through the door of a waiting bus. Not a green beanie in sight. I kept walking along the pavement through the jostling herd, like a single sardine swimming against the tide.

Head down in the next bus shelter was the green beanie, long limbs splayed out in front, with the OJ open on the seat beside him. He didn’t look up until I was standing in front of him, hand outstretched palm up, holding the abandoned muesli bar.

We both hung in that long moment of confusion as he looked from the muesli bar into my eyes, right into my eyes.

“Are you serious?” he said.

I pressed the muesli bar into his hand, gave him a droopy smile, and walked away. And then I started to cry. I cried.

I didn’t write this to show you that I can be kind. It didn’t feel particularly kind. I didn’t write this to puff up my red balloon of ego under my vest. That burst months ago and is now in tatters at my feet like an old pair of undies with no elastic.

So why am I writing this, telling you this small story? Because, it made me cry, and I still don’t know why.

Something in that millisecond as our eyes met, two strangers….. a brother and sister in this big stupid and wonderful family we call humanity, met, connected.

I can see now that my need to give was far greater than any need he had. I can see how my own pain has contracted my heart and soul and made me small.

I don’t know why that moment – the muesli bar moment – opened my heart, into my tenderness (tender from too much pain), to let in a crack of light.

I don’t know why it was his small need that allowed me to give, to remember my kind and tattered heart – no it’s still in my chest – though there is a lot of debris at my feet, old wrappers and abandoned stuff and of course my crumpled ego, but heart is still in its place.

I’ll never know what he thought when some stranger with a weirdly crooked smile pressed a muesli bar into his hand without a word. But I know for me that moment is as precious and as clear and bright as any moment I have ever stepped into.

I am grateful to have been in that small living story at the car park out the back of Ballarat Safeway, even though I don’t really know why I cried.

Aha! I’ve just had a thought that would explain the tears of my giving – perhaps my heart is a muesli bar?!