Reading Signs

Walking to Paddington Station this morning, I passed a black stiletto lying in the driveway of a hotel. The heel had bent right away from the sole.

A shoe like that tells a story. 

I see a woman flushed from a few drinks, barefooted, hanging onto the arm of a friend, one shoe dangling from her fingers, laughing as she picks her way down the grimy London pavement. ‘Just your imagination,’ you might say, and yes you may be right. But don’t you think we are too quick to dismiss the imagination? Of course, I may have that story completely wrong. I hope I’m right: that she did have a friend and wasn’t in the thick of some dark Paddington thriller. There was something about the angle of the shoe and the direction it had been tossed in that makes me say no: it wasn’t a scary moment, but that there was laughter. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but I believe one can read anything. People have been reading tea leaves, shells, coins, bones and stones for longer than we know. Why not a shoe? I once knew by looking at my friend’s unmade bed that she wouldn’t be returning until the evening. The way the blanket was pulled back and the crumple of the sheets transmitted that information. 

Many years ago, my friend and I went through the Sunday newspaper, looking at the photographs of unknown people. She covered up the text below as I studied each one. I was able to say whether the person was now dead or alive. Something in their eyes was either living or had gone. To my amazement I didn’t get a single one wrong. It was sobering. I never repeated the experiment; given that each photograph represented a human’s life or death, I don’t want to make a game out of that. 

I developed the ability to read people as a child. I was an imaginative, dreamy, only child, who more often than not had her head in a book. I went through long and painful separations from my mother, my only parent, and I lived with three different families and went to two boarding schools. Each household had its own customs, rules and culture, which I needed to learn. It made me a watchful and empathic child. There was a cost to that continual state of watchfulness and I have devoted much time to regulating my nervous system with breath, yoga, psychotherapy and many other healing modalities, including coaching.

All animals and humans are designed to read faces and body language, as well as the tracks and scents we leave. Reading beings, signs and things is a skill that anyone can develop. It  works best if we soften our focus into the wider perspective of peripheral vision. Then alive and relevant details are more likely to jump into focus and catch our attention.

It can be a relief to get away from the endless human noise and to read and listen to the messages of the non human world. Maybe you do this already. If not, try it out. 

Once everyone has left the room, what does the furniture have to say? Or what about the rock which has witnessed so much? And your cat, what does she tell you as she slowly blinks her eyes at you? What is it that the flight of the geese illustrates?

Let the sweep and reach of the branches of a tree tell you what you need to know.