Today Was Just Another Day, and That's Just the Way It Should Happen

Today was just about like any other weekday over the past year or so.  I put in some miles.  I completed what needed to be done at work.  I'd like to think I followed through on what I said I'd accomplish, and I tried a new sandwich in the work cafeteria since my routine sandwich was sold out.

Anacostia Morning with USS Barry

Even the photo of the Barry this morning very closely resembles what it looked like yesterday. 

We're coming up on the tick of the clock that will mark the end of calendar year 2015 and the beginning of calendar year 2016. There will be some talk of new beginnings and New Year resolutions.  Gym membership will spike, and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people will stay up till midnight local time to celebrate the passing of a an "old" year and the start of a new one.

I'm happy to report that I finding it vanishingly unlikely that I'll be an active participant in any of that activity. I've learned, albeit far too tardily, that none of those things seem to relate to how life actually works.  I don't have to promise to make a new me in the new year because for an entire calendar year now I've been incrementally pursuing the mastery of the things that I find fulfilling and those things that are most important to me. 

Life really is a series of very small events that either lead to incremental improvement or incremental devolution. The things that are most important are not measured in a time scale associated with years or months, or even weeks. Doing the next right thing on a day for day basis is how things really get done. When I'm lucky, I can narrow my focus to the moment or the second or the blink of an eye that is happening "right now."

I finally heard this lesson and started taking it onboard about three years ago.  Walking has helped me gather the evidence to turn a small amount of faith in this process into a solid belief. Daily practice has allowed me to hone the ability to try to live every day in this manner.

Today marked the beginning and end of important milestones in my life, but those milestones look an awful lot like the milestones from yesterday.  It was another great day, and with any manner of good luck tomorrow will be that way as well.

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.