Surprises

Over the last several weeks, I've become increasingly convinced that it's high time to share some of my thinking (if you can call it that) behind the idea of the Newport to Newport Transcontinental Pilgrimage.  I should probably start at the beginning, but since I've never exhibited any undue fondness for doing things the way they should be done, I'm going to start in the middle instead.

One of the unanticipated side effects from the training I'm doing for the walk is that I keep turning over surprises. I started this whole effort with a picture of what it would be like in my mind, and I have to tell you that not very much of it has lived up to my fantastical expectations. Today, after becoming convinced that I'd seen the range of panoramic shots produced by Google Photos, my phone spit out the following gem.

The single widest panoramic shot my cell phone has ever produced.

There must be five or six photos stitched together to form this bridge to bridge panoramic view of the Anacostia River.  To the left, there's the Suitland Parkway Bridge and to the right is the 11th Street Bridge. The photo is centered on the defunct power plant near the Washington Navy Yard.  I took it from the new floating docks adjacent to Yards Park.

This is a little surprise dealt up to me courtesy of the universe with a little help from Google, but I've found these little pleasant "gotchas" materialize more often when I walk.

I speculate that walking slows me down to a pace I've evolved to handle and I can grasp these gifts instead of whizzing right by them at highway speeds. Whatever the reason, being open to surprise and not often being disappointed by their appearance has become one of the primary benefits that I get from my walking. I don't know what might happen tomorrow, but I'm looking forward to finding out in due time.

Learning and Reiterating

Today I think I learned that stirring rhetoric recorded from the Justices of the Supreme Court are much rarer than stirring rhetoric from actors, authors, politicians, and others.

Supreme Court at Daybreak

I was looking for a caption to go along with this photo in a Facebook post, and I had a pretty hard time finding a quote from a Supreme Court Justice that seemed to fit the bill.  Ultimately, I was successful, but the search took awhile. To a degree I find that heartening. To be a widely recognized public figure and to have the discipline to keep truly remarkable quotations to yourself in this day and age is quite a feat. I'm sure that they try in the interest of maintaining the court's long held reputation as a place non-partisan institution. Be that as it may, the discipline to pull off that sort of accomplishment is nothing short of remarkable.

Capitol Building in the Waning Dark

Given a short notice tasker to "gist" about six pages of single spaced, font 10 text into six sentences, I discovered that the writing I've been practicing here on a fairly regular basis really is paying dividends that I did not anticipate. Jut on the mechanical side, my typing, which was already reasonable fast, has gotten quite a bit better. I can't quantify the improvement, but I know that speed has improved, and I'm less prone to mistakes. On the more creative front, I didn't really find it too difficult to digest the information and churn out an acceptable product in less than ten minutes. It was an assignment that I would have struggled with several months ago, but today the words seemed to flow through the fingers.

That development was another heartening event. Given the readership here (hint, there isn't any that I can discern), I sometimes find myself wondering if this effort is serving any purpose at all. Today, the benefit manifested itself in some unanticipated ways.

As is my custom, I'm looking forward to what the sea of tomorrow will bring in with the tide of dawn.