Something to Do While Walking

Walking is its own reward.  Through my walking over the last year I believe I've become more observant and less critical.  I've embraced the concept that there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.  I have a much better idea what people living on the street have to face, and I've gained a higher level of empathy for their circumstances.  I've learned to appreciate finding a bathroom, a cool drink, and the little chemical hand warming pouches.  I've gotten to see things that I never imagined even existed in the neighborhood where I live and where I work.  I've been accidentally caught up in a Mardi Gras parade.

One of the more beneficial aspects of walking is that I've found extra time that I never knew existed.  I'm not quite sure what I was doing with this time before...probably watching television or something equally unproductive.  Having this gift of time gives me the space to create something to do while walking.  Some of this time...actually quite a lot of it, I've spent talking to Rory Conlan.  I've spent a fair amount of time on the phone with other people.  I've listened to some music, and recently, I've been listening to the extensive library of TED Talks.

Street Art Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe in Annapolis, MD

Today, I was listening to a talk by Louie Schwartzberg titled "Nature. Beauty. Gratitude." given at a TEDx conference in San Francisco, CA.  Mr. Schwartzberg is a nature photographer who specializes in taking time-lapse photos nature, but that's not really captured my attention. What really grabbed me was the gist of a project that he was working on in 2011 that dealt with the gratitude of living in the moments that make up a single day.  One of the narrators pointed out the unique nature of every moment. That when we open our eyes, hearts, and minds there are endless things that enrich our lives and make mindfulness of gratitude an easy and natural state of mind.

My shadow on the trail...feeling grateful

To open my eyes and observe is to break the bonds of generalization.  Weather becomes what's happening in the moment rather than something to be clinically described by a weather predictor on the television.  The currents in the air, the moisture or dryness, the clouds in the sky that show apparently endless variation, or the nature of a particular rain.  They're always different and always interesting. This talk I was listening to reaffirmed the sense of wonder that's come back into my life since I hit the trail a little over a year ago.

A Water Tower and the Sky - Annapolis, MD

Observing the day like it is the first I've ever seen and the last I may ever see is the sense of wonder that I relearned while out on the trail. Looking back, I'm not sure when that lesson began to sink in and I began to recapture that sense of wonder we're all naturally born with, but somehow, seems to fade with the intervening years.  By recapturing the wonder of life, the gratitude for the gift of the experience seems to naturally rush back into my consciousness, and a sense of contentment and happiness follows closely in its wake.

It was another great day, and I hope for the privilege of another tomorrow.

Wrapping up the Week

It's been a pretty long and tiring week.  It's the good kind of tiring, and not exhaustion.  I'll keep this short and let some photos speak for themselves.

Early Morning, USS Barry

My morning string of panoramas was broken this morning when Google delivered this stylized photo.  It's not my favorite, but it's at least interesting.

US Capitol Building

I'm not quite sure what the person in the foreground of the photo is doing, but since it was the afternoon, this is a pretty rare shot with people.

USS Barry in the afternoon

Not to be denied, I got the panorama I was looking for this morning just a little bit later.

It's been a great day to wrap up a great week.

Wednesday Gratitude Week 1

During my brief meditation practice this evening, the thought crossed my mind of a number of things that I am truly grateful for having crossed my path.  The practice of documenting gratitude has been suggested to me in the past, and to date I have managed to skirt that recommendation.  My reasons for skirting that recommendation are not very defensible, so tonight I'll embark on what I plan to make a weekly habit on Wednesdays of documenting things that I am grateful for experiencing.

Anacostia River just before Sunrise

I am grateful that no one is reading this journal because it saves me from having to explain the reasons for including a photo of the same scene day after day. The reasons are multifaceted, but it all boils down to the feeling that it something that I should be doing right now without really knowing why that particular idea has stuck with me.

I'm grateful that the idea of walking long(ish) distances that developed about four years ago was eventually translated into action. The rationalization for that action at the time was to convince myself that what I was thinking about was not a very good idea. The thinking was a compulsion. The action has turned into one of the most rewarding experiences of my life to date.

I'm grateful for my relationship with Rory Conlan.  I wish at times he'd take a more active role in documenting our shared journey over the last several years, but I know he has his own reasons for delaying that action and I have faith that his participation in this shared journey is unfolding just as it should be unfolding.

I'm grateful for second (and third and fourth chances) of trying to get the complications of truly living down correctly. I have been fortunate enough to have been born into a very setback tolerant culture where taking risk is actually encouraged more than it's punished.  I've come to believe this is one of the true "secrets" to achieving what externally looks like success in this society. It also is an enabler of true success that may or may not align with the commonly accepted definition.

Capitol Building with Freedom being loosed from her scaffolding confinement

I'm grateful that I can stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before me.  Those bold men and women forged the great cities, states, counties, and country out of a vast and imposing wilderness and have facilitated my access to wealth and knowledge and opportunity that was beyond the wildest imagination they might have had when they built the framework from which this bounty flowed forth.

It's another great day, and I'm grateful to have lived it.

Three Things

There are only three things that made the cut for documentation today.  The first will be a familiar sight, since once again I captured the Anacostia sunrise with the ex-USS Barry "front and center."

Anacostia Sunrise with the ex-USS Barry as the Centerpiece

I discussed briefly yesterday that one of the reasons I take pictures of this view is because I routinely get pretty good results from my efforts. This reason was wearing a little thin, so today I invented a further justification. Sometime in the next several months the ex-USS Barry is going to depart the waterfront of the Washington Navy Yard permanently. Capturing relatively frequent photos of the ship in the lead up to the ship's departure for the scrappers may prove to be an interesting pictorial history of the ship's last days.  If printed, it would probably sell at least twelve copies.  In all seriousness, I suspect that I'm the only one doing this documentary of sorts, and it may prove to be of some interests to a very narrow group of Barry aficionados.  Since it's not out of the way that the pictures turn out pretty good, I'll continue this quest going forward and document the results here.  I'll probably leave out the commentary going forward because it is making my writing fall into an anti-creative rut so it's probably not as useful to me to continue to lean on this crutch.  Pictures only from now on with limited commentary unless something truly extraordinary catches my attention.

The second point is that today I learned that NASA is accepting applications through the USAJobs Federal hiring website for a position as an astronaut candidate (ASCAN).  I am going to apply. If anyone else reading this is interested, here is the link to the application. It's a crazy notion really and I'm on the old side of the age bell curve for this type of thing, but as soon as I learned the positions were being advertised and the timing lined up with another life event or two I knew it had to be done.

Space is one of those frontiers (not the final frontier I don't think, but one that beckons more urgently with every trip of the earth around the sun) that begs to be explored.  Manned spaceflight dovetails nicely with walking in my mind due to the exploratory and persistent nature that it takes to progress in such activities. The last time NASA picked an astronaut class was 2013, and they had over 6,000 applicants.  They made 8 selections. I suspect that given the heavy PR push that's accompanying this announcement that the number of candidates will be even higher this time around.  The odds of success are vanishingly small of actually being selected, but I know that I'll regret it if I don't throw my hat in the ring.

Finally, on my evening walk I noticed that the top tiers of the scaffolding on the Capitol Building had been removed.

Moon over the Capitol as the scaffolding surrounding the Statue Freedom being removed

I knew that the external portion of the restoration project to preserve and repair the iron dome of the Capitol Building was scheduled to complete sometime this winter, but the shrouded dome has become such a feature of my walks in Washington, DC that the realization of this progress caught me by surprise. I've looked forward to seeing this happen and now that the process has taken a visible step forward, my anticipation is growing to see the building without the gauzy accoutrements I've become familiar with.

All in all, another fantastic day.

Stepping Outside My Comfort Zone

It is not difficult to find plenty of discussion about stepping out of your comfort zone.  These is advice on why you should do it, how you should do it, quotes on doing it, and why you might not want to do it.  Google returned over 130,000 pages of search results in less than a second.

Today during my early walk, when my feet and back were hurting for reasons that I have yet to understand, I came to the realization that stepping outside of my comfort zone results in discomfort from time to time. Now, Rory is fond of saying that "physical discomfort is only important if your attitude is wrong." I'm inclined to agree with him on this sentiment, but it is worth noting that by its definition a step from the comfort zone is likely to lead to a little discomfort.  

That's alright, and the clear course of action is to keep stepping because your comfort zone will expand to fill your experiences for the most part.  It's just tougher to keep stepping in reality compared to the theory of resilience you had in your head when you were imagining it.

Anacostia Sunrise with the ex-USS Barry Front and Center

I did manage to push through this morning, albeit at a slower pace than I would have liked), and the afternoon walk, counterintuitively to me, was a much more comfortable experience.

I did go ahead and capture another shot of an Anacostia Sunrise with the ex-USS Barry playing a prominent role.  The picture and the composition were familiar and comfortable, and that's just what I needed to put another three brace of miles under the soles of my sneaks.

Monday Repeat

Today, another sixteen miles passed under the soles of my shoes.  With all of that walking, one might assume I came across some new and unusual scenes, but as it happens, I did a repeat of the sunrise and afternoon scenes of the ex-USS Barry from about the same position that I showed you toward the end of last week. As I've opined before, for some reason the same general scenes (on different days of course) keep capturing my attention.  It's probably a lack of creativity on my part.

Be that as it may, here they are.

Sunrise on the Anacostia with the ex-USS Barry front and center

This picture is a little bit darker than the last effort due to the relatively thick cloud cover that portended rain later this afternoon. There was a light breeze and the slight chop, but the reflection again caught my attention.

Afternoon shot of the ex-USS Barry front and center

I tried pretty diligently to take this shot from the same location as the last, but I believe i was one light pole too far away from the Barry in the afternoon shot compared to the morning shot.  Nevertheless, the details in the afternoon are revealed, but the tradeoff is that the gray light somehow makes the afternoon picture less alive and brimming with promise.  The day is a little more worn, but still good.  A little cooler and not quite as alive.

High Milage Sunday

A little bit of early morning tardiness payed off rather handsomely today with a total of just under seventeen miles in the books by the end of the afternoon.  I headed out around 0800, and the start was far too late to take in the full glory of the sunrise, but the view over the river was still rather pleasant.  Once again, the relatively calm winds and reflections off the boat wake waves captured my attention, and I spent a little more time than really necessary trying to capture a good photograph.

Severn River about an hour after sunrise

This is a decent view although the Google panorama resulted in a bit of discontinuity in the waves.  The right hand side of the photo captured the relatively long period swell created by a boat heading up river just a few minutes before, but the overall impression of the photo leaves a little to be desired.  I can assure you that the view in real life was worth the short walk to view it.  The weather was fantastic with temperatures in the mid-50's at this time.  The final high for the day was just below 70 Fahrenheit, so it only got better from here on out.

Severn River a hour after sunrise, Shot #2

The lighting a waves were a tad more cooperative in this photo, but the gist of it all is about the same.  This is the dawning of another great day, and I was there as a witness near the beginning.

Annapolis Harbor with the Annapolis Yacht Club in the background center of the shot

One of my principle goals was the walk over the Eastport Bridge and take a gander at the carnage caused by yesterday's barbeque of the top two floors of the Annapolis Yacht Club (AYC).  It should be noted that I've been walking in downtown Annapolis for over a year now, and Sunday morning is always a relatively tranquil experience until about 1000 at least.  There are usually only a handful of people out and about, and vehicular traffic barely registers on a normal Sunday morning.

Annapolis Yacht Club After the Fire

Today's traffic was a different sort of animal all together.  I've had it in my mind that capturing images that centered on the beauty of the outdoors might one day might encourage folks to take up the mantle of pedestrianism.  Apparently, I've been approaching things incorrectly because while a beautiful sunrise or sunset can be reliably counted on four or five times a week at least, a fire at a yacht club is a relatively rare event.  This one brought out the "tourists" early on a Sunday morning like no sunrise ever has in the past.  In this photo alone there are at least seven folks that have come out to view the damage.  I had to wind my way through a small throng of people to get to this point, and the vehicular traffic was also noticeably denser on the Eastport Bridge.  If one wants to get people outside, one might consider channelling their inner arsonist because the torched building and campfire pall that it cast into the air drew people to it like moths to a flame...so to speak.

Weems Creek Around Noon

I wrapped up this morning's jaunt with a little over twelve miles, and I topped it off in the early afternoon with another hike that came in just under five miles.  It was a great day for walking, and I feel like I accomplished what I set out to cover.