First World Problems and a Way to Minimize Their Impact on My Wellbeing

I have a handful of what I call first world problems.  It was not always so.  In the not too distant past things like traffic during my commute, standing in line at Sam's Club for the privilege of shelling out three figures for vast amounts of diapers, pork tenderloin, and ready to cook dinners, the constant negotiating environment of working in an office that managed high $M amounts, and paying on the order of $2.89 and 9/10 a gallon for gasoline were major stressors  in my life.  I'd listen to the radio or watch cable news and people I did not know would tell me how these things impacted me, generally in a negative way, and I'd worry about them.

Take the price of gasoline as an example.  If the price of gas was low, I'd be told that it was good for the consumer (presumably me), but it was damaging the earning potential of large market capitalization energy companies and was putting downward pressure on the economy.  I felt just a little bit more wealthy, but I was waiting on the other shoe to drop in the event that the economy tanked and my large cap mutual fund took a beating week after week.  If the price of gas was too high, someone would tell me that I had less disposable income to spend in a discretionary manner (entertainment being a big part of that "budget"...more on that later), but the economy was humming and my "deferred" enjoyment (again the large cap mutual fund) was collecting all those nickels and dimes that would one day make me a millionaire.  It didn't matter if the price of gas was too low or too high.  Someone was always willing to tell me how it was going to bring me down if I were willing to listen.

I have found a cure in my walking to these first world stressors, a way to find fulfillment in the way that I choose to entertain myself.  In fact, I'd go so far to say that I rediscovered a bit of the art of recreation in the millions of trudging footfalls that I've managed to take over the last several months.  It's recreation rather than entertainment because each step, each breath, each blister, and each foray into the heat or cold or glorious crisp temperate morning was a process of re-creating my outlook.  I soon realized that I no longer had to pay (with that decreasing disposable income) for the privilege of having someone else tell me what I needed to worry about.  I don't have anything really to worry about.

As I was walking through Sam's today, I realized that I am  wealthy beyond all reasonable expectation.  I left with 7.5 dozen eggs, 2 lbs of pork, 4 loaves of bread, 36 cups of yogurt, and enough cat food to last my overindulged felines a couple of weeks.  I had enough money in my bank account to pay for this bounty, and I only had to spend about 7 minutes in line to do so.  It might be a problem, but it's a great problem to have.

I used to hate going grocery shopping, but over the course of the last couple of thousand miles of pedestrianism, I found gratitude along the way, and my life is much richer for the experience.

This is the sight that greeted me this morning about six miles into what ended up being about a twelve mile day:

Anacostia River Sunrise

This glory of the universe happens on a rather routine basis for me now, but it never grows old because it is different every time.  This type of vista communicates both my smallness in the face of the great cosmic powers and my special place in the grand scheme of things for being given the gift of taking it all in.  The price of gas may rise and fall, but this will happen again tomorrow, and it will be fantastic.  I don't even have to be there to witness it, and the greatness that it represents will still be displayed for anyone who will take the time to observe it.

One other thing that I saw this morning was further evidence (if you're still jonesing for someone to tell you what to think of the beauty that surrounds you ever day and how it is evidence of some lurking disaster):

Those Crafty Masons And Their All Seeing Eye - Watching Over
Our Nation's Capitol - Waiting - Plotting - Mustering the Resources
To Install the One World Order - Our Freedoms Under Attack

All of that might be true, but I doubt it.  Sometimes a pyramid shaped mosaic is just that, and the location, particularly after a bit of low intensity exercise (actually practice...at recreation) was a glorious place to start a day filled with gratitude for my first world problems.

Escaping, Shrinking, and Enriching

Wold Traveler Bird - West Street, Annapolis, MD

To really understand the nature of the Newport to Newport Transcontinental Pilgrimage,  you should probably understand some of the history behind the idea (and it still remains only an idea) and how that idea has evolved over the last several years.

In the beginning, the idea of the walk was a fairly irresponsible escape fantasy.  I was not happy in my work (for no real reason other than a sense of entitlement and a gigantic ego, I might add), I was consuming far too much alcohol, and both of those situations were having the predictable negative impacts on my family life.  I'd sit in my cubicle and think about running away.  Leaving everything behind and just hitting the road.  I suspect it would have probably taken about a week for anyone to notice and then care enough to report my absence at work.  My departure would have probably been noticed at home sooner. At the end of the day, I did not have the gumption to carry through with this idea.  I didn't even make any preparations for it though at the time it seemed like a solution, however temporary to many of my problems.

Fast forward a little bit, and with a little help I reigned in my use of the legal anesthesia, my work life improved, and my home life, though challenged, began to take on a semblance of tolerability.  The one thing that didn't vanish from those dark days was the kernel of the idea of walking.  The thought had taken root and I just couldn't let go of it.  Certain aspects of the idea began to shift.  Instead of seeing it as some last great cannon ball run across the country to escape my troubles, the thought of walking shifted to being a mechanism to shrink my world.  I thought it might be a way to keep my thoughts in the present.  To focus on the relatively mundane happenings that were occurring about a meter in any direction from where I found myself in the universe.  I needed a way to bring myself into the present.  I was no longer a mechanism to escape my past, but it did take on the theme of escaping my imaginings of the future.  I thought that if I walked, I could focus on what was happening just a few paces from where I was sitting.

Another development happened around this time.  I actually started to walk.  My initial efforts along the B&A Trail that runs between Annapolis and Baltimore in Maryland were not particularly successful in bringing me into the present and shrinking my world.  I found myself thinking of the next three of four miles and imagining what they would be like to traverse.  I was restless, and if I'm honest I was bored.  Walking was also surprisingly difficult physically.  My feet hurt.  I chaffed.  Don't get me wrong, I could strike out and cover a couple of miles in relative comfort, but then my mind would begin to wander.  It would wander forward and backward.  It was also a relatively solitary exercise, and I found that I did not particularly enjoy being in my own skin.  The downside of walking was that it was doing exactly what I hoped it would do, and it was shrinking my world down to the meter around me.  There we no great distractions to take my mind far away from where I found myself at a particular moment.  The great thing with walking was that it took a fair number of moments, trudging along, to change my environment appreciably at all.

For reasons that are really not clear to me even now, I stuck with it.  Slowly, incrementally, walking became a practice rather than merely an exercise.  What started as an exercise in boredom became a time where I could quiet my mind with practice.  I learned not to worry about mile #8 when crossing mile #1.5.  I shrunk my world to the meter around me.  I learned not to imagine how tired I'd be in two hours.  I learned that it was enough to take the next step.

Somewhere along the way, I started to observe rather than see.  I started to pay attention to what was happening, both within and without.  The boredom receded.  The worry about the future and escape from the past grew less.  I started to see and hear and smell things that I had long since discounted as unimportant.  I began to see the value in things that I'd previously defined as unpleasant.  I began to enjoy them.

I've stumbled across two great paradoxes associated with my walking.  The first was that I could not ever escape by this creepingly slow means of transport.  Those fantasies were about escaping my situation, but at the end of the day, I was creating those situations, and walking is a terrible way to escape from oneself.  My fantasy was a fallacy since the means of escape (as I experienced) ensured that the thing I was running from became front and center to my existence.  This had always been the case, but it took the exercise of walking to realize it.

The second great paradox that I slowly caught up with (or more likely was just overtaken by) was that over time the practice of walking shrunk my world while at the same time expanding my horizons.  Even though I walk the same paths time after time, I am no longer bored.  The scenery and environment are always different and new.  The process of creation is alive and well all around us, and if I take the time to observe it, live in it, drink it all in and revel in the glory of it, I am content.

That's a whole lot of words that inadequately describe a bit of the journey I've traveled to get to this moment right now, so I'll leave you with some pictures captured during my walk today.  I've seen versions of all of these things numerous times over the last eleven months, but for some reason all three struck me today.  These images were all new and exciting and thought provoking earlier today.  They were that way in spite of the dozens if not hundreds of times I've encountered them before.  Today, I found them enriching and I really don't know why, but I'm grateful that they did.

Miss Anne II at the City Dock in Annapolis - The winding key on top is new this season

Main Street, Annapolis - Generally looking North

It's Been Quite Awhile

Ironically, just after I posted about my intentions of posting more frequently (once a day if I recall correctly), I took about 11 months off.

There are plenty of excuses I could use, and I did pick up my walking quite a bit shortly thereafter, but suffice it to say that the intentions while good were insufficient to keep me headed in the right direction.  C'est la vie.  I have had some fantastic experiences during that time, and I'll leave you with a photo to whet the appetite.  As mentioned, my walking picked up quite a bit, and that effort to shrink the world and slow down a little has become quite paradoxically one of the more expansive efforts that I've ever experienced.  It's been a great trudge, and I'll leave you with a picture from the time that I've been away.

Sunset over Mobile, Alabama