One Page a Day, Increment Two

Sunset Reflected in the Back Window of the Car

Today I really didn't make any great strides along the path to the cross country pilgrimage, but I am trying to follow the example of the inventor of Pringles, and at least make an attempt at putting in my one page a day.  I suppose I'll count this under the category of Intellectual Practice, and chalk up a win for the Adventure.

I was reminded last week that more often than not taking action often precedes the development of faith.  That is not how I've lived a great deal of my life, and I would describe it as counterintuitive except that characterization flies in the face of a great deal of evidence to the contrary.  The way I have thought of my life during much of my adult life is that faith (be it in a greater power or divinity, myself, or any other entity really)  precedes the action.  I say that this flies in the face of a great deal of evidence principally because when I look back on the way things really unfold, I discover that action is often the precursor of faith when I feel that things are going my way.  Put another way, I've been living my adult life with a ready made excuse for inaction.

It falls along the same lines as acting my way to right thinking rather than thinking my way to right acting.  Maybe it's just me, but I actually find that when I try to intellectualize my way forward in the absence of physical action, the results are often not what I had planned or hoped to achieve.  A more objective view, in light of the empirical evidence, suggests that because I live a spiritual existence in a physical plane and that my principle means of influencing this existence resides in the physical plane, it makes sense that faith follows action and not the other way around.

My habit of generally trying to build faith that will lead to action seems to be one of those characteristics that I must overcome on this journey from coast to coast.  I've heard Rory put it another way.  He's been quoted from time to time saying something along the lines of, "Do something...even if it's wrong."  That's good advice.

It's a bit frustrating that I've spent so much of my adult life trying to stand this sage advice on its head and going about the building of faith in a far less effective manner.  It's also frustrating that when I spend the time to closely observe the way my children interact with their world, they appear to take action in the pursuit of faith.  This tendency manifests itself in their physical courage, and their apparent instinctual ability to act in the pursuit of confidence or faith.  I don't really know where I learned to be so deliberate, but I suspect that I've reached the point of diminishing returns and it's time to revert to those more fearless roots.  The past is the past, and I'll let you know how the present is going.

The First Day of Fall 2014...Another Great Day

Sunset Jogging - Spiritual and Physical Synergy

Today was another good day for progress on the Pilgrimage.  I took a jog that covered the sunset, the weather was beautiful, and the view...well, judge for yourself.

Today is the first day of fall, and it is difficult to imagine that in the next sometime in the next several years, the N2N-TCP should be just about wrapping up in the Pacific Northwest on a day that I see as being much like the day that presented itself to me today.  There are quite a few miles to go, but I put in a small part of that distance tonight just before sunset.

One of the unexpected benefits of this focus on the N2N-TCP Adventure is that I am more content, and performing better in the day job that I'm currently spending my time in to earn a living.  The whole idea of this Pilgrimage really started as a means of fantasizing about an escape from (at the time) my current condition.  It's evolved quite a bit from that fantasy without a great deal of effort on my part.  There is something to be learned from that observation.  

Back then, I was well and truly unhappy.  Today things are different.  My circumstances (from the outside looking in) have really not changed all that much.  One could credibly argue, if one were so inclined, that certain aspects are in fact worse from the original thought of walking across the country.  This is not how I view things.  My outlook has shifted, and I believe that shift in perspective is mostly based on the pursuit (however nascent) due to the pursuit of a dream.  It's an expansive dream, and the daily steps are quite small (and therefore manageable), but the pursuit has changed the way I see.  The progress feels quite remarkable.

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...