I did not intend it to become a practice.
It started as exercise, as the body’s request for movement after the first months of retirement when the built-in movement of a teaching life was gone and the body noticed. I went out because the body said to go out and I walked because walking is the movement that requires the least amount of deciding and I came back because I had to and the next morning I went out again and then the next and then the next until the going-out was the thing I did before anything else could ask for my attention, the first act of the day that belonged entirely to no one but me.
I know this route in all its weathers now.
The February version with the ice on the path at the corner by the park and the particular quality of cold that gets into the wrists above the glove line if you do not tuck them properly. The May version when the trees are doing the thing they do in May that they only do in May, the particular green that lasts about ten days before it darkens into the green it will be for the rest of the summer, the ten days I try not to miss. The October version I already wrote about. The November version that is the hardest, the low light and the stripped branches and the mornings that feel like the world is practising going dark.
I go out in all of them.
The November version too. Especially the November version, because the November version is the one that most requires the going, that most benefits from being met rather than avoided, that holds the particular medicine of a cold grey morning when you are the only person on the path and the world is quiet and stripped and honest about itself, not performing anything, just being the November it is, and you are in it, just being the person you are, and the two of you are out there together in the honest grey morning and there is something in that, something that November cannot give you if you stay inside, something that requires the meeting.
I come home different than I left every morning.
Not transformed. Not resolved. Just slightly repositioned. The thing that was large when I left is the same size but I am standing somewhere different relative to it, I have walked around it once, I have seen its other sides. The walk does not solve anything. It changes the angle. That turns out to be enough. That turns out, most mornings, to be exactly enough.
