Walking redirects our muddled thoughts. Walking slows us down, and resets our chronometer to the natural speed of life. It helps us to connect with each other in shared conversation, or merely in the silent rhythmic pace. It echoes history and tradition through a most simple movement that has remained “essentially unimproved since the dawn of time.”
Walking? That’s how you keep the barbarians at bay? But… but…, I thought it was Reading, and being Informed, and reminding people that it’s The Year 2026!
Whenever I pick up C. K. Williams’ Repair poems, there are a few that I instinctively flip to. One of them I was just reading the day before reading the Gaskovskis above.
I’ve quoted it before, but this is from his poem “Risk”:
Difficult to know whether humans are inordinately anxious
about crisis, calamity, disaster, or unknowingly crave them.
These horrific conditionals, these expected unexpecteds,
we dwell on them, flinch, feint, steel ourselves:
but mightn’t our forebodings actually precede anxiety?
Isn’t so much sheer heedfulness emblematic of desire?How do we come to believe that wrenching ourselves to attention
is the most effective way for dealing with intimations of catastrophe?
Consciousness atremble: might what makes it so
not be the fear of what the future might or might not bring,
but the wish for fear, for concentration, vigilance?
As though life were more convincing resonating like a blade.
“We engorge our little sorrows,” he says, “beat our drums, perform our dances of aversion.” Isn’t that a strange thing about much of our “awareness”? That some of our strictest attention is ultimately an aversion; we use our concentration, our thoughtfulness, in order to avert.
One of the funny things about the ancient sin of sloth is that it has very little to do with laziness as we usually understand it: the hardest working workaholic can be the most slothful person in the world. Slothfulness, acedia, is “a vice of the productive,” says Rebecca DeYoung. “The vice of acedia in its originating context, then, names the monks’ resistance to inner personal transformation (conversio moralis in the Benedictine tradition), as well as the people and practices that foster it. In fact, they would likely raise spiritual concerns about making a virtue out of our diligent busyness or productive activity.”
Humans are good (and bad) at thinking. But nowhere is this ability put to more intense use than when thinking our way out of what ought to be done.
Aquinas, says DeYoung, saw acedia as “aversion to the divine good in us.” (Politically speaking, might it also be aversion to the divine good in others — averting our minds from the always present divine good in all others?) And he saw its opposite, its remedy, not as attention — or not attention per se — but as Sabbath rest.
The final stanza from Williams:
Always, “These gigantic inconceivables.”
Always, “What will have been done to me?”
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,
though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?
I know I have said this before but I’d like to move my attention back in the direction of newsletter writing. There was a time when I easily had time for all of it — working, playing, reading, writing, studying, blogging, hiking, photographing, relaxing. Now, and in many very good ways and for good and natural reasons, not so much.
Probably all digital life inherently succumbs to the fast and superficial, but that doesn’t mean all digital communication is monolithic. There may be some areas where the cons of digital communication are actually outweighed by the pros or, better, where it sufficiently draws on some aspect of the non-digital, the real. (“A record of life lived elsewhere,” to use a phrase I’ve borrowed for this topic before; restoring a self-hijacked visual cortex, to use another. I do like these occasions for being reminded of older posts.)
Regardless of the reasons, I feel my online life has become sporadic and disconnected. And that lack of time I mentioned leaves me striking at almost nothing but lower hanging, less satisfying and less meaningful fruit. One way to reverse this is simply to slow down, to allow more of that non-digital, organic matter to have its effect on this trembling consciousness.
Aside from the usual call to get out and touch grass rake some leaves, it’s not a bad time to adjust my own digital landscape. Importantly, the newsletter thing is for me a way of writing that is, or has certainly felt, closer to the act of walking. And I want more physical, mental, and digital walking.
I am still fairly new to online life, having only started to explore it in 2020. And that began, not a little coincidentally, with this quote from John Ruskin: “It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”
I am haunted regularly by another line from Ruskin, about how the more we speak of our intentions, the less chance there is of our realizing them. So I say this with great risk, but I’ve had 90% of a newsletter written for the better part of a year now, and I’m hoping to get that sent out before Thanksgiving.
September 2021 — Looking east over Bradley Lake from Garnet Canyon below Middle Teton, Meghan hiking up the trail on the left, looking forward to a short snack break before the rock scramble up the Southwest Couloir. Recycling this from one of the previous posts above. More pictures from that perfect hike here.