ICP #2

Generally, my practice is to walk two or three times a day.  About once every ten days or so, I only get in one period of pedestrianism, but since 04 October 2014, I have not missed a day of walking yet.  I've been asked before if the walking ever gets boring, and early in the process before I had embraced the idea of the daily practice, the specter of boredom was something that I actually spent more than a little time dreading.

Like many things in my imagination, I completely missed the mark giving any mental or spiritual bandwidth away to anxiety associated with boredom.  Early in the first month of daily walking, I did find that I had to get about a mile under the soles of my feet before my mind would settle in to the rhythm of my own steps, but once that happened and I stopped thinking about whatever it was that popped into my mind my senses were opened in ways that I had forgotten about.  Let's face it, these weren't new experiences, but I had been deliberately shielding myself from them with the accoutrements of technology for many years.  I'd insulated myself from the weather with clothing and housing.  I'd not gone hungry or thirsty for a very long time.  Noise and smell were dampened by the steel and glass protection afforded by my automobile.  Even the speed of life had been changed by the application of technology.

Today, I fell into the plodding rhythm of my march a little bit sooner.  I feld the breeze on my right cheek, and the light hint of humidity in the cool air of the morning.  The smell of plants and exhaust were in the air, and if I'm not mistaken I tasted just a little of the first hint of fall.  All of that coupled with the things that I saw placed before me a sensual cornucopia that transcended boredom immediately and placed me in the path of beauty.

Heron Sculpture illuminated by the waning of the afternoon sun

The experience of being one with the environment is a feeling that I've come to cherish.  That sense of connection is something that I'm able to carry with me throughout the non-walking parts of my day, albeit to a lesser extent.

South (left) and North (right) on the trail this morning

The concern with boredom was completely unfounded, and the sensation of oneness with all the glory that surrounds me during these stretches of serenity is something that I wish I could share fully with you.  The sound of the footfalls clears the mind and changes the way you observe.  This change is not instantaneous, but it is inevitable as the action associated with the practice takes a course that is both irresistible for any great period of time and fulfilling beyond anything I expected.

Severn River looking East

The pictures fall short in capturing the sensation, but they hearken my memory back to the flow of the breeze, the sound of the traffic, the pinch of the mosquito, and the warmth of the sun.  It's a richness of experience that I've been seeking for awhile, and it was waiting to be experienced just a few steps outside the door.

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.