Incremental Progress and the Daily Practice

Stress testing some new kicks early on the longest jaunt to date

James Altucher often writes about what he calls "The Daily Practice."  I highly recommend his blog, and I've found that more often than not I can find something that he's writing about that helps refocus my efforts, gives me a little boost, or let's me know that I'm not the only one with some of the same type of thoughts going on in my head.  It turns out, that we all have similar (certainly not common) experiences, and focusing on the connections between us is what really proves to be most beneficial making daily progress toward living in the dream that is life as it happens around me.  Today, he had a post about Gene Wolfe and writing a page a day.  It's a great perspective, and bolsters my confidence in incremental progress.

Speaking of progress, last Tuesday, I embarked upon the longest "training" walk that I've done to date in the march towards the Transcontinental Pilgrimage.   It was a great day, and I covered about 31.2 miles in just a little over ten hours and fourteen minutes.  Seventeen miles of this walk re-traced the ground where I conducted my first long walk in the Pilgrimage effort.  I say it was a great day because I am finding that just slowly, agonizingly slowly, every day is getting better and better.  This is not because I'm training, or have learned any great insights, or found the perfect shoe, or am losing weight, or have the right hydration plan, or any of those other externalities.  Some if not most of those things have incrementally improved over the last several months, but what has changed the most is my perspective.

My shift of perspective is a manifestation of the one of the pillars that I talked about in the last post.  The shift of perspective is spiritual growth.  One of my principle hopes is that the N2N-TCP will result in a great deal of spiritual growth.  Along those lines, the other two pillars of Physical Change and Intellectual Challenge will play a critical role as well, but the Spiritual Aspect is what I'm really looking forward to right now.  

There was not good, bad, and ugly during this walk.  There was progress.  I also got to see this for the second time, and I was able to appreciate how it represented my  relative powerlessness in the grand scheme of things as well as my connection to my surroundings much better this time than my first embryonic attempt covering this ground.  I leave you with a scale model (on an unimaginably small scale) of our very own solar system.

The Sun

The Nine (yes, Pluto's still counted) Planets

This scale model of the solar system covers about five miles of trail on the course of the latest long walk, and it represents millions of miles of physical distance in a very small corner of the Milky Way Galaxy.  The scale of our environment is unimaginable, but I'm grateful to be alive and connected to it in my own very small way.  Till next time...