It all made sense as he told me about the long, slow walks he had been taking classes along beaches and rivers in his rohe (region).
For the first time they were seeing things they had never seen before - simple things such as cloud formations and animated driftwood dumped above the high-tide mark - both with faces of silhouetted beings that could have been looking back at them forever, just waiting for them to slow down and see them.
I started my slow-down Daddy's Day by reading the Sunday paper from cover to cover, soaking up every story, forming an opinion and then turning the page. It was decadently enlightening, almost like rediscovering reading where each word has its own value and each paragraph in an opinion column carried a message just for me.
When I looked outside my caravan window across to the Norfolk pines standing sentry along Pilot Bay I slowed down and counted each layer of limbs from top to bottom and then I counted each majestic tree from north to south.
The numbers of trees and limbs matched perfectly and I laughed to myself thinking what would arborists or tree huggers say about that?
Then instead of watching seagulls for a fleeting moment I picked one out and slowly followed its flight until it disappeared into the backdrop of the Kaimai Range. It took all of three long minutes but they were three minutes well spent on Daddy's Day.
You become very voyeuristic when you slow down. I started seeing a pattern in people who passed by our caravan, oblivious to my stare from behind my strategically positioned newspaper. You notice how many walkers around Mauao carry a cellphone and how most of them do a compulsory check just in case the world might disappear in the next 40 minutes.
The interesting observation about this is the slow walkers never looked once at a cellphone, it was only the pacers and the trotters - all in a hurry to get nowhere fast.
The other good gawk from behind the sports page is the pre-ascension checklist by climbers, duplicated at almost the same point once they have scaled Mauao and are back outside my caravan window.
Wedgees are re-aligned, phlegm hacked and water bottles sucked harder than a spring lamb on a milk-laden mammary.
Then the real kicker, if you have slowed down enough to notice. It's the blink-and-you-will-miss-it moment, the quick subtle scan sideways, just in case there could be an applauding audience in this crowd-goes-wild sporting moment. When the tide turned as I slowly turned the last page of the paper, I swear on a politician's promise I saw it happen - that's how slow I was watching. From one end of Pilot Bay to the other, each boat seemed to salute as it went about and turned with the tide to face Mauao.
It was pure theatre choreographed by Tangaroa for the pleasure of an audience who had slowed down enough to watch it; waving in the wind up to Mauao - as if to say, "Kia ora, my friend, great to see you again." I waved back.
There is something to be said about slowing down. Perhaps we should have the year of slowing down as a digital detox and see where that takes us?
It was the longest and best Daddy Day present ever.
broblack@xtra.co.nz
