when we convene again to understand the world

On Walking, and Finding Beauty in a Time of Trouble

Susan in Muir Woods, 2020.

This happened to me recently at a dinner gathering: someone thought I was ten years older than I am.

(This is not good, I don’t care how age-blind one is.)

At first, he spoke in decades — we’re all from the same decade, right? he said, looking at us across the table — so that we could anchor ourselves in time the way writers do in narrative. If readers don’t know where they are in time and space, they become untethered; we have all had this experience, and we end up wondering how did I get here, have I been here before, who are these people. So this person, whom I had never met, although I knew his name, wanted to make sure that if he talked about the year The Byrds appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, or going to hear live music at The Fillmore East, we would know where he was coming from.

He was a lovely, interesting man and in no way meant to be rude (nor was he). Still, it struck me as curious: he was the third person in as many weeks to guess that I was ten years older than I am, which means that either my body is catching up with my exhausted spirit, or I look like shit, or both. Even that last statement isn’t fair: my wife is ten years older than I am, and people regularly guess she’s my age or younger. The old dictum It isn’t the age, it’s the mileage seems to apply here, and as I write this, I could put my head down on my keyboard and nap for, say, nine or ten hours.

When he talked about music, I told him that I was a big fan of The Byrds, and had been since the day my grandmother went to our local record store and bought me the forty-five for Turn Turn Turn in 1966, when I was three. I never made it to The Fillmore East, which closed two days before my eighth birthday, in 1971. But if I had gone there to hear live music, I would have loved it, I’m sure.

I was worried about becoming resistant to feeling the pain of daily loss in the way a raincoat is waterproof: with every news report, sorrow rolls right off my body into a puddle of anguish fatigue.

I am, however, old enough to remember the time in 1969 when my cousin’s student union at Cornell was in lockdown. Even though I was five, I certainly remember what happened when the son of one of our neighbors, a Marine officer, didn’t come home from Southeast Asia, in 1968. And I can clearly recall the covers of all our newspapers when young college students were mowed down at Kent State University in 1970, and my grandmother sat on our sofa and cried for their mothers, holding her head in her hands. My grandmother was tired, having lived through two World Wars, the Depression, and the loss of her baby brother to the 1918 flu epidemic. And then, the news out of Vietnam every night. And after that, Kent State, right in front of her eyes, with that curly-haired kid who could have been her grandson face down in the street in a pool of blood and a fourteen-year-old girl kneeling over him with a pleading terror in her eyes.

People were tired — bone tired — everywhere you turned. Emotionally, physically, and spiritually exhausted. They were heart-tired.

Everywhere I turn now, people are tired: tired of the news, tired of the rage, tired of not knowing what is going to happen. Tired of endless acrimony and division, tired of resistance to peace — on all sides — because not many people are interested in it. I am tired, to quote Fitzgerald, of people not being able to hold two seemingly opposing ideas in their heads at the same time. I told our dinner host that I was worried about becoming anesthetized to the pain of daily loss in the way a raincoat is waterproof: with every news report, sorrow rolls right off my body into a puddle of anguish fatigue, and all I want to do is sleep. A month or so ago, all I could do is watch the news, weep, and think What in the f**king hell are we doing to each other, as humans?

As I wrote this last paragraph, I realized: I feel older. Maybe the other dinner guest was right in guessing that I did. I have been accused of wearing my heart on my sleeve, so if I am heart-tired, perhaps he saw it.

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Redwing Walkers.

I have lately taken to going on daily walks, even very short ones, without the benefit of AirPods and podcasts, so that I can look instead: everywhere in my neighborhood, gardens are beginning to wake up. Our nepeta is starting to appear, in fits and starts; our astilbe is coming up, and the peonies seem to have spread. We have been going to bed early — very early; ridiculously early — and I have re-acquainted myself with the joy of reading actual books instead of my Kindle (which I started using when Susan was still commuting so that she wouldn’t bothered by my nightstand light). Everything in my life feels like it is slowing down; I’m tired of the sucker punching and the quick jabs that seem to be part and parcel of a world that has grown increasingly, ironically, binary. You’re right and I’m wrong, and that’s it. Being outside — walking, hiking, even just going around the block with Fergus, our dog — diffuses that tension, and that sense that we will never, ever move forward together again.

In my new book, Permission, I’ve written extensively about the human need to be right; we’re invested in it, our psyches almost demand it, and for most of us, when we’re engaged in conversation that might seem oppositional — the people with whom we’re speaking may not see eye to eye with us, or we with them — we can actually feel the adrenaline coursing through our veins. What I have tried to do instead is approach those with whom I’m engaged in a conversation that might be oppositional is just listen with curiosity, and leave myself open to the idea of possibility: the possibility that I might learn something new because I was previously closed off to it, the possibility that my mind might be changed, the possibility that the other person might reveal themselves to be someone other than who I thought they were. The flipside: there is always the expectation that they might be doing the same thing although sometimes — often — they’re not. I will keep listening anyway. But this is where things can get complicated.

We are now in a place where there is virtually no room for nuance because most people don’t want nuance: they just want to be right, no matter what side of the conversation they’re on. Then there are the folks who by design start from a place of interest and genuine curiosity, lure you in, pummel you, and then declare you to be closed to discussion, even though they’ve somehow mistaken verbal abuse — racial, ethnic, religious, political, fill-in-the-blank — with conversation, which, of course, it’s not. (In NPD parlance this is called baiting.) And it’s not going to get anyone anywhere but stuck in the crave-y, grabby fire of arrogant validity.

The quality of our life depends entirely on which seeds we garden and nourish in our consciousness. - Wendy Johnson

A while back, I was a guest on the wonderful podcast, This Morning Walk, hosted by Libby DeLana and Alex Elle. In our conversation we talked about the act of walking — physically and metaphysically — and I posited that perhaps walking might light up the same neuro-receptors as art-making: both expose the walker and art-maker to beauty and, at a certain level, both are meditational acts. I mentioned that my wife once walked with Thich Nhat Hanh, in Washington DC, back in the eighties. Walking takes the walker out of themselves and exposes them to air and light. Both walking and art-making are grounding, tethering exercises. Both slow cellular aging; I believe that both also have the power to heal heartbreak at the micro and macro levels. Walking is connected to noticing, to seeing, to watching, to listening.

Walking is connected to patience. Walking is how, said Rebecca Solnit, the body measures itself against the earth.

In her brilliant book, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, Wendy Johnson writes that In Buddhist texts, consciousness is said to be a field, a piece of earth on which every kind of seed is planted. On this field of consciousness are sown the seeds of hope and suffering, the kernel of happiness and sorrow, anger and joy. The quality of our life depends entirely on which seeds we garden and nourish in our consciousness.

The quality of our life is also dependent upon where we walk, how we walk, and how we look at the world around us when we do. It is indeed dependent upon the seeds we sow, and whether they’re hostile, or they’re not. And always, who we garden with.

Wendell Berry said it best in Given:

When we convene again
to understand the world,
the first speaker will again
point silently out of the window
at the hillside in its season,
sunlit, under the snow,
and we will nod silently,
and silently stand and go.

A version of this essay first appeared in 2024.