An Elevator Meditation

I spent an hour - or at least it sure felt like an hour, it was probably more like 30 minutes - stuck in an elevator this morning. I was taking our darling dog, Bonnie, out for her morning constitution as I always do. I have morning duty and she knows it. She’ll lick me out of bed and then do a dance for me until I cave.

In any case, I’m pretty sure God was laughing at me today. So here’s a lesson in Karma. (I realize some of you may think I’m mixing and matching my religions like the old bartender from Boondock Saints mixes his metaphors at this point... “You know what they say, people in glass houses sink ships”... but they’re interchangeable in my world since they’re all ultimately pointing us towards the same trail of breadcrumbs.)

You can see the bartender in the first 60 sec of this clip. If you're me, you'll skip the fight.

So why is God laughing at me? Well, we still have 2+ feet of snow on the ground here in DC after getting dumped on the last few weeks. Personally I don’t think it’s all going to melt until April, and frankly, I’m tired of it. So I rebel in my own small ways. I’m tired of having to get all layered up with my socks and my boots every morning to go outside. Therefore today I reverted back to my raggedy old tennis shoes - untied - without socks. And like a triggered reaction, where does Bonnie insist on doing her business this AM? In 3 feet of snow!!

Now I’ve already established that I’m not a huge fan of the snow, so you can imagine how cheerful I am about having it in my shoes - my sock-less feet completely submerged. Needless to say I wasn’t feeling my Pollyanna Zen.

So maybe I was a little snappy with our sweet-as-can-be dog... maybe I could have shown a little more patience or graciousness for the fact that she has to wait on my lazy butt to be taken outside and go #2. And maybe someone ‘upstairs’ decided I needed a little time to think about this, like a kid in elementary school sent to the corner to ‘think about what you’ve done’ while you stare mindlessly at the artistic and never before noticed cracks in the wall just above the window.

This is how I felt as I noticed for the first time just how disgusting the carpet in our building’s elevator truly is. It’s, like, beyond casino carpet. It’s casino carpet that was torn up in the 70’s, left outside for about 20 years, and then reinstalled in our cheap-ass Arlington apartment building. And the smell - don’t even get me started. Usually your time in an elevator is brief, so its like a passing glance to your nose. But as soon as you realize those doors aren’t going to open in the next 30 seconds, it’s a full on assault to the senses.

I noticed all of this because when we got in the elevator to return to the apartment, the doors closed, it lurched, and then nothing. We were stuck.

So after hitting numerous buttons and jumping up and down a few times, I stopped to ponder. I apologized to the dog for my sins and transgressions and then began to replay my life in slow motion. (I was trying to drag it out because I was faced with the prospect of possibly needing to make it last all day. The emergency-call-button guy said he was still trying to find a mechanic. After all, it is Sunday morning. Wouldn’t want to disturb his morning coffee, would we?!?)

I begin to meditate. Then the conversation goes something like this:

‘Dear God, I know I haven’t really been going to church lately... and I’ve been given a plentitude of opportunities to take stock of my life. I promise to start doing it in a more intentional and reverent way if you’ll promise to let me do it in a slightly more pleasant environment.’

God just laughs and lets me sweat it out a little longer, getting pleasure from the fact, I’m sure, that I gave up my technologically advanced ways and have no smart phone (or any phone for that matter) to even tell the outside world about my saga while I’m in the midst of it. Instead, I continued to ponder the error of my ways in silence. At least I got to spend some quality time with the dog, whom I promise to be more patient with from now on and forever more. Amen.