You have to be present to win
Living in the moment, being mindful, seems a difficult exercise for me except when I'm outside; in the woods, the grasslands and prairies, on a trail or walking along a river. I am most present then. My mind is at ease and I am alert. During this time, I've noticed I'm most likely to observe and see things in my immediate surroundings that I think most people miss. For example, this afternoon I got out of my vehicle with the intent of talking a walk on a wooded trail. As I walked in the direction of the trail head, I walked on the sidewalk along a wooden fence that separated the sidewalk from a steep grassy bank of a water tank/water feature and notice a fiery skipper (Hylephila phyleus) an a sneeze weed flower. Naturally, I turned around and walked along the opposite side of the fence to get a closer look. As I approached the the patch of sneeze weed, I realized that one skipper had just turned into about 25 that suddenly floated up from the yellow flowers. Every step I took after that flushed twenty or more skippers for about 50 feet in a 150 sq foot area that was covered with sneeze weed. I stopped counting at 150 skippers, several yellow-collared scape moths, one common checkered skipper, three pearl crescents, one green cloverworm moth and one swift setwing dragonfly.
At that moment of observation of all these skippers confined to one small patch of flowers, I felt as if I was the winner of something great. Immediately, I wondered how many people have walked by this very spot today and more than likely not noticed or if they did, simply took it for granted what they observed. I was grateful for the experience.
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I've had the same experience/thoughts. Several months ago I was hanging out at one of the wildlife blinds on a trail I like to hike, and as I'd walked up the boardwalk to the blind I'd seen three snakes sunning- you had to look for them, but they were there. While I was there I had a family walk up to the blind and one of them asked me if I'd ever seen any snakes around- I said "all the time", and the man looked around and said, "well, I don't see any here today!". He was standing about 5 feet from a broad-banded watersnake on a log. I think the more frequently you get out and start looking the more you see; I had no idea 6 years ago that there were so many different species of dragonflies, and now I can usually observe 8-10 different species just by walking down the trail in summer. Even now I'm sure I still miss things.
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