Walking


Dear Eugene,

This past Saturday I walked to church.  Took me 3 hours, about my average when I took it slow.  I planned my time but didn't plan my way.  I tried to go on a different street every time.

This Saturday was extra special though, the first time I started this--let's not call it "pilgrimage," but simply a longer walk--before sunset and walked into it.  It got cold pretty quickly and didn't take long for me to know I underdressed for the occasion in more sense than one.  Even the biggest street, the one I chose for the final part of my journey, felt lonely when everyone was in a hurry to abandon her to her own moonlit melancholy.

It took about 45 minutes before I could start stop talking to myself, nonsense I regurgitated throughout the day with casual determination.  Then I became a-lone, which in Cantonese sounds exactly like "a hole," a receptacle with its bottom fell out.  So I just took things in as they came, acknowledging no deep consequences, not that there was none or I discounted the possibility of any.

I walked into a thrift store, looked for nothing, looked at everything.  Everything interesting.  Everything was interesting: fabrics, ceramics, relics of, yes, Christmases past.  I saw things for their smell, time entwined, path crossed, experience layered, unfolded and passed on.  I searched for the washroom but found it only after I had given up and was already out the door looking through a glass darkly.  I smelled my imagination and said Forget it and moved on.

Then I got hungry.  The moonlight was warm but that's not how I felt it.  I saw a little Vietnamese restaurant, not open, not even a hint of it opening soon, strange enough, at that hour.  I wanted to have whatever they're going to serve me, hot liquid would be the best, and I knew for certain I would be very happy with anything on the table if only they would let me come in from the cold.  There was not a whiff of Phở in the air but perfect contentment in me.  I was a bit scared by how happy I was, how unreasonably so.

Why do you like to walk alone for so long? someone asked before.  I could come up with something profound to wow her, but that would just be nonsense I regurgitate throughout the day with casual determination spit out to speak about the unspeakable.  My answer was trite and would remain so as long as it remains true: to meet God and to meet myself, not necessarily in that order, one step at a time, left and right and do it all over again.

There's something irreducible about a person walking, alone, for a long time.  She needs to trust someone is going to carry her if she's to fall and the path too wide and barren to echo her end.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 20, 2018 at 10:52 PM

    "All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." - Friedrich Nietzsche

    ReplyDelete

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