“He was always in a hurry to get where he was not.”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Parkinson’s disease affects your ability to move. It makes you stiff, impairs your balance, causes you to shake, and slows you down. In fact, bradykinesia, the official term for this slowing down, is a cardinal symptom of the disease.
Hurrying
It is the summer of 2017, about nine months since my Parkinson’s diagnosis. On vacation in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, with my wife, Tracey, our daughters, Meredith and Holly, and my parents, I awake earlier than usual one morning. Having slept like a man without a care, I am now eager to start the day.
Faint rays of early dawn drop through the skylight above our bed without constraint, which hastens me to the coffee pot downstairs. With no one else awake, after making the coffee I decide to take a walk on the beach. We have a busy day ahead of us, so I will soon need to hustle back to our rented beach house and usher my children out of bed.
Walking barefoot, the beach sand feels cool between my toes. Dry at first, it becomes damp as I move closer to the water. Looking in both directions, I can see a couple of dozen people who have beaten me there, though the beach still feels mostly untouched. Gentle humid breezes blow, and I see an older couple walking side-by-side on the water’s edge, also barefoot and moving at a calm pace. Both of them occasionally bend down to examine washed up seashells of most every shape imaginable. The choppy ocean waters glisten behind them.
The man picks up a shell and shows it to his companion, and her face takes on the form of an “ooh” as she rubs the small of his back with her hand. Additional tender gestures between them prompt several reciprocated smiles. I wonder how long they have been together, what joys they have shared, and what heartaches they have endured.
With the tide going out, I can still see fragments of jagged shells and salty froth that mark the waterline from the previous night’s high tide. The beach service that drags this debris away each morning has not yet passed by.
A lone seagull flying low in search of food caws. Drawn to it for a brief moment before looking down at my watch, I see it is time to return to the beach house, so I turn, pick-up my pace, and hurry back.
We need to plan our day.
Slowing Down
While walking briskly, I see someone who reminds me of a man I met a previous summer, when the four of us visited my parents just a few miles away in a town called Pawley’s Island, where they lived at the time.
I flash back to this memory.
One afternoon, we make a visit to Brookgreen Gardens, a wildlife preserve and sculpture garden located nearby. A warm, still, and humid day, after walking around the gardens for over an hour and feeling the effects of the heat, we search for a shady place to sit down. A covered pontoon boat, which, we learn, travels in the slightly cooler marshes of the Lowcountry, looks inviting.
We ask a young woman selling tickets on the makeshift dock how long the boat ride lasts. I’d made plans for us to have an early dinner.
“I think we’ll have time if we hustle,” I say to Tracey. She lets out a faint sigh.
The boat’s captain welcomes us aboard. A man who appears to be in his 50s, leathery tanned skin tells some of his story, which, as we learn, has unfolded in these marshes and the nearby ocean.
We push off from the dock, and as he steers the boat slowly through calm tidal creeks lined by beautiful sweetgrass, live oaks, and saw palmetto shrubs, he waxes eloquent about life in this part of the world. A floating encyclopedia, he speaks about the region’s wildlife, plant life, and customs with the conviction of a street preacher and the reverence of a cloistered monk.
Then, he cuts off the boat’s trolling motor, which slows our momentum and leaves us floating calmly in the dark reedy water.
“My philosophy is to never be in a hurry,” he says.
“Never.”
“Wherever I look, people are hurrying to get somewhere…anywhere…and why? The years pass quickly. We’re on this earth for such a short time,” he says.
His tone is resolute, but not judgmental.
My eyes meet Tracey’s. For decades, she has told me the same thing.
“I learned as a young fella that, whether I’m driving my boat in the creeks or my pickup on the highway, when I go too fast I miss beautiful and interesting things,” he says. “Things right in front of me. Things I won’t see again.”
Then, pointing first to a heron in flight and next to a magnolia tree in bloom, he grins and says, “You miss a lot when you’re in a hurry.”
Breathing
I slow my pace and turn toward the small waves barely breaking on the beach, stopping at the water’s edge. Looking out over the choppy ocean, I see an enormous bare horizon. A gentle breeze blows as a young child, walking alongside her mother, squeals. Several seagulls circle overhead, and moments later a large school of fish darkens the water as it passes by.
An unusually shaped shell catches my eye, popping with various colors before the white froth washes over it.
Slowly breathing in the salt air, I press my bare feet into the cool wet sand, wishing that Tracey and the girls were with me.
_____
Photo by Michal Pechardo on Unsplash
Allan Cole is a professor in The Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2016, at the age of 48, he serves on the Board of Directors at Power for Parkinson’s, a non-profit organization that provides free exercise, dance, and singing classes for people living with Parkinson’s disease in Central Texas, and globally via instructional videos. He also serves as a Community Advocate for ParkinsonsDisease.net, writing columns about living well with Parkinson’s. He is author or editor of 10 books on a range of topics related to bereavement, anxiety, and spirituality. Currently, he is writing a book on counseling people with Parkinson’s disease, which will be published by Oxford University Press.
Follow him on Twitter @allanhughcole