Date: 2005-01-16
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

12:45pm1.16.05The reason I walk? To escape physical boundaries. Ironic, and counter-intuitive perhaps, that it takes a physical act to do so. Started the digestive process of Solnit¢s writings. After my long anecdote of yesterday, I never got back to reading. Now I am, and I am immediately halted by her expression (considerably more articulate than mine) of the sentiment I attempted to convey. ¢Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were 3 characters finally in conversation together, 3 notes suddenly making a chord¢¦ It leaves us free to think w/o being wholly lost in our thoughts.¢ ¢Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations,¢ ¢¢¦the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts¢¦suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts, and that walking is one way to traverse it.¢ Okay. Enough. If I continue in this vein, I¢ll be quoting virtually the entire book. If these words grab you, viscerally, if you ¢get it¢, then go read Wanderlust yourself.Sorry. Just couldn¢t pass this one by. It¢s the verbal expression of a philosophy I¢ve come to embrace wholeheartedly. ¢It¢s the unpredictable instances b/t official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.¢ I spent the first 20 years and change of my life trying to plan, for the present, for the future. And what have I discovered? The best things in my life, the best days, the best moments were the spontaneous, unplanned, unexpected, unpredicted ones. The moments that steal your breath. (I¢d never believed the literal accuracy of that aphorism¢¦until it happened to me.) The moments when you cry from laughing so hard, your stomach cramps from the tension. The moments of a communal understanding w/ someone else, that requires no spoken communication. The unplanned encounter of a total stranger, who immediately becomes a lifelong friend. These are the moments of your life, that define you, that make you you.4:40pmSpent the morning at REI, scrounging through the clearance racks, trying on heavier-weight fleeces. But, ultimately, I decided that the price wasn¢t really worth it. I survived last spring, right? But, when I left for my walk this afternoon, I had to question my choice; it was bloody cold. Was this fleece really going to cut it? ¢Course, I only have a T-shirt on underneath, and on the trail I¢ll be packing 2 additional layers, plus rain gear. Plus, after a scant 5 minutes of blood-pumping, heat-producing activity, I found myself unzipping the fleece. Yeah, I¢ll be a¢right.The sky is this deep baby blue, w/ golden highlights on the clouds. And the clouds? The clouds are ripples in a pond, frozen in time.7:30pmAnother quote from Solnit, this by Rousseau: ¢Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself¢¦as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot.¢ That sums up perfectly my sense of having, on my hike last spring, discovered myself, begun to identify, define myselfImagine your shadow stretching 300 feet. The length of a football field. And not really ever ending, simply blending into the earth.