These Solo Walks

I looked like I was walking alone, but I was accompanied by my beloved dead, the usual cast of characters. They never saw the likes of this. I inhabit a world of wonders, and it isn’t fair that their landscapes were so constrained and their troubles so excessive––and so I bring them with me.

On this particular morning, the road was hemmed with emerald. Borders of green grass had sprung up in the aftermath of recent rain, now iridescent in the early morning sunlight, and I stopped in my tracks to delight in it. I imagined my sister Marlene standing next to me, her honey-colored hair awash in sunshine, and my brother Eddie, a little boy again, skipping on ahead.

Time slips around like that sometimes and sense is suspended and we float freely in another realm. I know it’s probably wishful thinking, but for an instant the wish is fulfilled, and it’s no less real or more ephemeral than everything else.

These solo walks are therapy, a time to cavort with ghosts, talk to trees, and let my mind roam freely. I have my best ideas while walking. I agree with Rebecca Solnit when she writes (in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking) that “Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”

Yes, walking looks a lot like doing nothing, a lot like killing time. (Killing time…I like that concept.) Walking is peaceful motion, quiet engagement with the landscape, and stream-of-consciousness input steadily delivered from within and without. It is, as Solnit says, a way of “knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.”

Thoughts and characters intrude at will, or sometimes I intentionally conjure them up, and occasionally I start out with specific topics in my head, like what to include in the book I’m supposed to be writing, or why I feel so unsettled about a certain interaction, or how to live a meaningful life. Yeah, that last one is a biggie, but I don’t avoid it.

Lately, as the uphills become steeper and the heat feels hotter, I remember that I’m old. Not ancient, but getting there. In fact, I’ve been watching myself aging, and it’s a fascinating and humbling experience. And when I walk I ponder how best to navigate this segment of my life.

One of the best responses I’ve ever read to that question is from Bertrand Russell, excerpted by Maria Popova in one of her Marginalian posts:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Maybe that’s why walking lends itself so gracefully to becoming old. It’s the outside-ness of it, the step-by-step acquaintance and interaction with the physical world, with the universe that will eventually absorb us.

It reminds me of another quote, a beautiful realization by Willa Cather, one of my favorite writers:

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

That’s how I feel sometimes when walking. My self-absorption diminishes, and I’m truly looking outward, not as a separate entity but a stardust speck in the whole epic spectacle, a part of it all, right where I should be. And I may look solo, but my dead will have joined me, and I am every age I ever was, and maybe none at all.

It doesn’t last. It’s just a spell.

Then again, it may be a glimmer of some greater merging to come.