I typically don't do things by halves. If I can graduate with a master's degree one year after my bachelor's by doing an accelerated program, I will. If I can hike Mount Washington up the Jewell Trail and down the Crawford Path with my cousins for a grand total of 13 miles in a single day, I will.
The past five years, however, have slowed me down a lot. Oh, I still chafed at the constraints put on me when Covid shut down the world and my mom's cancer diagnosis changed my life forever. I wanted to run as fast as I could from the desolation I saw before me and within me.
But running was the one thing I could no longer do.
So I walked. Through the cow pastures, past the beaver ponds, up the hill to the castle of a rich man's folly: my home state showed her beauty to me in ways I had never noticed before.
When I moved to New York City, I knew I wanted to be able to walk to work, and so found an apartment that sits about a mile away from my school building. For the past two and a half years, I have walked roughly twenty minutes to work, twenty minutes home.
My daily walks have built a wonderful rhythm for my days. Whether elated or deflated, frozen or overheating, I typically walk the mile to or from work at roughly the same pace. What's funny is that I used to feel angry and hurried when hiking long distances or walking to work. I'd feel frustrated that I wasn't already at the end of my journey, even when I had just begun. But what my daily walks have slowly, slowly started to teach me through daily repetition is the patience needed for getting through life. Yes, life holds much boredom which can be punctuated by moments of terror, to repurpose a phrase coined during World War I.
But boredom need not be wasted.
About a year ago, I started walking to work without listening to music in my headphones. I felt uncomfortably bored on those first few walks, until I started letting my mind wander as it did when I was a child. My boredom turned into thinking, and imagining, and dreaming, and noticing southern Brooklyn's beauty. The birds hidden in the branches overhead singing in chaotic choruses, and the crocus spears forcing their way through the packed earth---both spoke to me in ways that went deeper than words. Nature's God taught her the slow, unhurried pace, I am sure. Hurrying is my response to anxieties within and without. It is my attempt to control the uncontrollable. But I can no more force myself to experience a eureka moment than I can walk a mile in thirty seconds. And ironically, it happens to be slow growth and daily repetition that lead to moments of clarity which I could call flashes of insight, if I'm feeling poetic.
Like the dripping of water on a boulder makes little pools over the years, my daily walks are teaching me to listen to their wisdom. "You are loved," they whisper. "You are loved."
Coda
Journal entry from February 2024.
... A mockingbird drops down on the sidewalk four feet in front of me, eyes me expertly, then unhurriedly flies away. Sparrows chirp their morning prayers as I pass the monastery.
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