Having too many things pressing on my mind: work, studies, responsibilities, I decided to take a short walk outside hoping I could resolve or at least lose some of them along the way.
I check my mobile before leaving. I used to worry about not being able to get in contact with people, missing messages, losing keys or having to call relatives for help in an emergency. But nowadays I can be at peace and easily leave my mobile behind when needed. The only thing I still miss though is the camera on it. I might stumble upon a fluffy fox or a double rainbow and miss the opportunity to share a picture with everyone. Meh, it’ll have to go. With only my keys in my pocket I leave the my apartment by the back entrance, instinctively avoiding a human encounter - a neighbor smoking outside. I hate the smell of cigarettes - and meeting people.
Even though I live some distance from the city there are still only a few nice walking routes to take. One is a strip of woods and fields between a golf course (what a waste of land those are) and the main road that goes by my apartment. This is the nicest route because it is totally wild and has raspberry bushes full of sweet berries at this time of the year. However it is rather short and because it has just rained the tall grass would get me all wet from the knees down. So I choose my second best option: a public path through the park nearby leading up to a hill. None of the these routes are ideal however. I would like to have one that makes a circle that leads me back to my apartment. But for each route I must either retrace my steps, or take a less nice road back home, usually a sidewalk with cars running by.
Once I step over from the pavement to the gravel pathway I feel better. Tall grass lines the path that the rainy summer has grown lush and thick everywhere. The path winds down first through a meadow and then into the woods. And I let my thoughts wind down that path.
There are snails everywhere after the rain. Carrying their tiny houses on their backs, I dread on stepping on any since it makes a horrible crunchy sound. For a while I place my paws carefully each time scanning the ground for a free passage. But they keep forming a mine field on the road. I cannot stand it. I close my ears and make a run for it.
After the meadow there is a straight path through the woods. An old road perhaps. Perfectly symmetrical stips of grass and moss line it like a fancy carpet at a hotel reception, with trees on each side making a similar effort to impress. My first thought is: I wish I had the camera. Then I relax and just enjoy the view. A horrible blaring noise echos in the woods. A pair of those miniature motorcycles young people are allowed for some reason race on a nearby road on full throttle. Somehow the almost deafening noise fits well with the scene I’m looking at. A kind of abstract scene from a Kubrick movie perhaps where you are faced with a path of destiny. However the significance of the moment eludes me as the soundscape breaks abruptly. The motorcycles stop at an intersection. There is silence. Somehow the magic of the moment is lost. So I move on.
The trouble with paths is that they never go the way you want them to. You would want to have a path that goes from A to B, and then take you via a different route back to A. But no. You get to B and you are stuck. The only way back is to retrace the same route you just walked on. Boring. Oh, well. There is some comfort if you think about the path as not being the same when you walk it back. The point of view is different. There is that. But also from an existential point of view - you never walk the same path twice. As time moves on the path is different. And so are you. A different person walking down a different path. Just because it’s the same path doesn’t mean you won’t notice something new, or think different thoughts. At least this is how I rationalize it to myself. And I have to. This is the only nice path that goes from my apartment.
For a moment I recall past relationships and the disappointments. Perhaps I should look at them as analogous to the paths: no two relationships are the same. And I’m no longer the same person either. Perhaps it’s time to give it a try without the fear of making the same mistakes again and going down the same road to misery... I quickly shake off such thoughts. I don’t want to delve in old memories right now.
The nicest bit of the path travels below a wooded hill with some old trees on it, with canopies reaching thirty or forty meters, the undergrowth being kept in check by their shadow. Fully mature forest with strong bark that has seen many a decade of winters and storms that I wrote about in one of my previous posts. However now that I’m self-conscious of my enjoyment, I begin to lament the fact that it’s going to end soon. The path to the edge of the forest isn’t very long. Perhaps less than 500m. There the wood ends and changes to a minor road between houses. It’s always like this. I enjoy the journey, not the destination. I want to climb mountains, but from the top I cannot see the mountain. A sentiment from a haiku by Japanese poet Matsuo Basho (松尾 芭蕉, 1644–1694). This is why I travel, but never want to reach a destination. Perhaps because I feel there I have none. There is no one waiting for me there. A home. Where is it? What is it?
Adventuring is about living in the moment anyway. That is why I like getting lost on my travels. When I’m Tokyo I take random walks where I just walk aimlessly in one general direction and enjoy all the things I encounter, without worrying where exactly I’m going or if I’m getting lost. I can always find a subway station back to my hotel or grab a taxi. It is that kind of careless existence that I seek. Find moments of freedom in. And that kind of attitude is needed if you want to experience places and notice things. If you have a predetermined path and schedule you are slave to its tracks and the clock hurrying you makes you forget to live and stop to explore an alley where you might find a scruffy cat to scratch. As children we knew how to live in the moment, fully. I used to play by edge of the forest, where the tidy grass gave way to the wild undergrowth of the forest. All the wild plants were much more interesting than the managed grass, and only my mother's calls to come eat lunch broke my journey through the wild undergrowth. I never had a destination to my journeys then, and neither have I now.
I take a shortcut through the grass and get distracted again by work related thoughts. A sewage pumping stations has a shiny new cargo container next to it which I recognise as a standby diesel generator in case of power outages. It keeps the sewers from overflowing even if there is a major outage of electrical power. I’m glad someone has thought of such a vital aspect of our infrastructure that everyone just takes for granted.
Little disappointed at not keeping my thoughts straight I wonder down the road between expensive houses and their gardens. A person is taking out their cat on a leash. I ignore the person and concentrate on the cat. It’s one of those Persian fluffy ones. And as cats usually do on leashes they just wander aimlessly not bothering one bit where their owner actually wants to go. I exchange some pleasantries with the owner while checking out the cat which seems happy to get some attentions. Then continue on up the hill.
As the road once again turns into an unpaved footpath I’m presented with a fork in the road. All the old interesting looking paths I would usually follow are dead ends I know. After the motorway was constructed they were cut off. There is only one option that actually takes me somewhere. Further up the hill which is called ‘the chilly hill’. Being tall and exposed you get a chill up there if there is slightest of wind. From the top you can see tens of kilometers in almost every direction. Only towards the city center are there are tall tree tops which obscure the horizon. It is there that the sun is setting. Orange glow below a soup of clouds. A bright spot lingers between the treetops but I cannot see any detail from all the glare. So I turn around and look down into the valley and the horizon. There I see the sunset in action. The shadow slowly moving in the landscape. Cutting trees, factory chimneys and high rise buildings in half. From the tops of their windows I can watch hundreds of reflections of the orange ball of fire I couldn’t otherwise see. Sometimes it’s worth looking the other way. Most of the scientific methods of observation are based on this idea - you get much more insight into a phenomenon of nature by looking at it indirectly, its interaction with the environment.
Nowadays we talk of bubbles a lot, people living in their own bubbles of ideas. What they can or choose to see. But from the standpoint of general relativity we all live in a bubble of time. However far we gaze into the horizon, we can only see light that has travelled to us. When we look at our own sun we see light that left its surface some 8 minutes ago. We have to wait 8 minutes to actually see what is currently happening on its surface. Consequently if we were to live to be 100 years old and at the beginning of our lives asked the question what is happening at that star up there right now, we would only get the answer within our lifetime if the star was nearer to us than 100 light years. There are only 76 stars (of spectral type "A") within that distance - or inside the our time bubble. A bubble we can ever receive any information from during our lifetimes. The rest of the universe is beyond our reach. We cannot see or hear it, nor can we send a message to it. At least not while we are alive. All we can do is look into the sky - and see light that started travelling towards us hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago.
My bubble is so small that I can only worry about what happens next day, next week, perhaps 6 months from now. Beyond that there is not much that is reaching me at the moment. Leaving the the rays of the sun bouncing off into the distance I move on.
Couple of guys in their 30’s are playing with a radio controlled car, a dune buggy of some kind and seem to be having lots of fun. I’m glad they are free to do their own thing and nobody is there to judge their life choices. I’m often too worried about someone judging my life choices. I avoid talking about them.
Coming down the hill from the other side towards the houses I smell a fragrant smoke from their chimneys. Wood fire is one of my favourite smells. I consider myself quite sensitive to smells. I don’t like strong perfumes and use none myself. And I hate cigarette smell which makes me nauseous. Wood smoke from properly dried birch logs on the other hand has a sweet calming smell that brings forth memories of campfire sausages, evenings around a fireplace and lakeside saunas. I know the sweet part of the smell is actually incredibly toxic and carcinogenic aromatic carbon rings making all kinds of compounds and forming soot. But most of them smell rather nice and often sweet. Hence the name ‘aromatic compounds’. At such low concentrations as they are carried by the wind they are quite harmless to enjoy. I stop several times to breath in the whiffs floating by.
Arriving back to the edge of the woods where the footpath ended, the sun finally gives up its orange glow and is extinguished by the clouds. Sharp shadows disappear and calm dusk settles in. At each step it is getting slightly darker. Yep my eyes adjust and I can still see under the bushes where the light is the least. Human eyes have an amazing dynamic range. The range of processing different amounts of light. There is however a limit to it just like with a camera exposure. You will not see inside shadows if you are blinded by a glaring light. However our brains do a trick that extends this a somewhat. From our current field of view the brain takes many ‘exposures’ by moving the eye to focus on different area of our field of view. On some exposures it focuses on the dark bits and blurs the bright bits and therefore gets more detail from the shadows. This way it can compose a ‘scene’ and present to us an appearance of seeing in one go much more detail from our field of view than would be possible by trying to take one huge exposure with our limited dynamic range. I take several exposures with my eyes to try to confirm this theory. I should really look it up on google when I get back home so I won’t just make stuff up (nah, I didn’t).
A dusk is just the time for foxes to go hunting after resting all day. But I’m a fox with a full stomach having had a huge dinner earlier. A shrew runs across the road, pausing briefly in the middle to gauge me as a threat and then scurries off into the undergrowth. I leave chasing it to a more hungry fox. Although come to think of it, I would probably try to chase down the fox if I saw one. Take it home and feed it. It would become one fat fox in my care.
Then once again I reach the end of the path and cross the road to my apartment. I wonder how am I going to remember to write down any of these thoughts. Perhaps I could somehow get a printout from my brain? Memory is so fickle that I probably have forgotten half the things I wanted to remember and made up the other half. So it goes until we begin to carry HD-cameras with us everywhere that stream our whole lives on record into cloud storage. And that day isn’t far off. Until then there is still time for adventure. Even if only an hours evening walk.
At the stairwell of my apartment complex the familiar smell of someone cooking casserole.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
~ Tolkien
