Cracked

First I should probably tell you that this post has been rolling around in my brain for months, most of the summer actually. I'm not sure exactly what that means, to have a post in my mind for so long and then to recognize that the night has arrived for me to write it. Maybe it means I'm a slow learner and it took me this long to understand the meaning I'm supposed to glean from it. Or maybe it means that sometimes thoughts and ideas are better when they ferment for a while ... like a good wine that gets better over time. At least I hope that's the case anyway ... that I can adequately convey what I have been and still am learning. One thing I am certain of, however, is that the more I learn, the more I realize how much more I need to learn.

I have two basic routes I follow when Oliver and I walk each evening, and the one we follow is generally determined by the weather and how light or dark it is when we begin our nightly stroll. If it's bright and sunny, we walk along the trail that winds through the woods ... the trail that is made of black asphalt. If it's already dark or near dusk, Ollie and I walk on the sidewalk that runs alongside a main road with plenty of street lamps to light our way ... the sidewalk that is made of gray concrete. Though the trail route curves along the creek while the sidewalk route is perfectly straight, they take about the same amount of time for me and my little pooch to walk. In regard to distance, the sidewalk route is actually longer, almost a mile longer to be exact. I think the reason Ollie and I are able to walk the extra distance of the sidewalk route in the same time as we do the trail route is because there's no one else on the sidewalk to distract my little wiener dog's attention from the task at hand ... or at paw as the case may be I suppose.

For as different as my two walking routes are, there is one big thing they have in common ... they both have lots of cracks. I first noticed that the cracks were becoming more significant late last year, and I thought it was probably due to the lack of rain causing the ground beneath the concrete and the asphalt to settle. But it's only been since early this summer that I noticed something else ... something big ... something that causes me to wonder and ponder and contemplate every time I walk. The big thing? Grass. No, really ... I'm serious ... grass. See here's the thing ... the cracks in the sidewalk have grass growing in them, and the cracks in the trail don't. Believe me when I tell you that I have being trying to figure out why for months, and I still don't the answer. I've thought about it a lot ... a whole, whole, whole lot ... and I still don't know why grass grows in the concrete cracks and not in the asphalt ones.

As I stepped over the grass protruding from the cracks in the sidewalk tonight when I was walking with Ollie, a thought burst into my mind and lodged itself in my heart. "Maybe the difference is what's inside, Ollie buddy ... maybe the reason the grass grows in the cracks of the concrete and not the asphalt has something to do with the chemical makeup of the materials. Or maybe it's because the asphalt is thicker than the concrete. Or maybe I'm never going to figure this out, little dog." The more I thought about it, the more I began to think about life, and the more I began to think about life, the more I began to think about the cracks that come along from time to time ... cracks of sadness, cracks of illness, cracks of lost relationships, cracks of death, cracks of so many of the hard things in life. But then I thought ... just like the grass that grows through the cracks in the concrete of the sidewalk, I grow through the cracks in life. It's not when my heart is all put together that I grow the most ... it's when the sidewalk of my heart is cracked that the green of the grass breaks through and begins to grow and grow and grow.

You can bet I will never see those cracks on the trail or sidewalk the same way again, friends ... you can bet I never will.