What I walk when I talk about meaning

Everywhere I go lately I get there only with small, contentious steps. The whole surface of the earth seems to be made of liquid. I mean this quite literally in that the city has been laid to hibernation beneath twelve inches of snow and what was cleared away left behind slush in lumpen piles lining the sidewalks like a layer of mucus, like the whole city needs to sneeze and blow it all out. I’m tempted into the larger metaphor, I am, but it would take me too long to get there. My boots are insufficient.

It’s been some time since the city has seen a winter this heavy and constricting. My freshman year of college when I lived in dorms on Beacon Hill it snowed in avalanches, swallowing downtown for weeks on end. They called it snowpocalypse, as they are often wont to do, but it was wonderful to me who had nowhere important to go, all my friends under one roof, and no concept of my own fragility. My winter jacket was thin and ineffective but I waddled through the corridors of the snow, shivering and joyous. The city, with all its ruckus and hurry reduced to silent flutters and bundled beings stomping, falling, gliding down carless streets. The city seemed to be for the people, finally.

That was over a decade ago. I’m a practical person now, I have errands and responsibilities, a daily maintenance required to keep a grip on myself, an intentional tedium with only so little room for spontaneity and positive framing. To be a functioning body I need to walk and this congested winter does not provide my ideal conditions for walking. The sidewalks are so suddenly narrow. There’s oncoming foot traffic and no one wants to brush up against the other passersby and chance a possible connection. I’m a fast walker and it feels like being muzzled to have to look where each foot falls and feel my weight transfer left to right and make sure with every step that something does not give out under me.

Walking is one of, if not the most, important practices in my life. More than a consistent writing routine, more than a proper sleep schedule or remembering to stave off isolation with a phone call, I must walk in order to keep up with myself, otherwise I find that my life has gotten ahead of me and I must work double time to catch up with it. Luckily, I find walking to be less like drudgery and more like an inevitability. A walk is such simple pleasure. There are so few limitations and endless opportunities for careful focus. If you take a walk with me we are experiencing the world in motion together. It’s something I’ve always found very special. When I step out from my apartment and pick a direction it sets my every gear into motion. Internal mechanisms I’ve been neglecting begin to groan and turn and say ah—what will we grind into form today? There’s a lightness to walking that I cannot access in other modes of being. I trust my legs to carry me without much fuss and I trust the day to speak something to me and I trust the earth to not open up beneath me while my gaze is thrown ten steps ahead.

There is no other thinking quite like the thinking I do on a walk. It is creative thinking and I mean that literally as well. Every thought is cooked and cured in the chamber of my traveling brain, each thought feels new and teasing of infinite possibilities. It’s the closest I come to the sort of thinking generated by psychedelics, where every idea produces pathways you must choose to take with the knowledge that it might lead you somewhere you aren’t prepared for and there’s no turning back once you’ve chosen, no taking the other path, no returning to the original thought and starting over. You’ve already been changed. In motion, my thoughts take to movement as well and worm their way through passages in my mind I otherwise do not touch. My entire sense of depth widens, like a deep inhale.

In essence, I do much of my writing on these walks. I sift through ideas, weigh the merit of a scene, pick apart a character and contemplate if I’ve been getting them all wrong. Sentences drop on me fully formed from drooping branches I’m ducking under and I have to catch the sentence before it slips away and joins all the other detritus on the ground, inseparable and indeterminate. It’s a tough bargain, balancing the walk itself and the thoughts it kicks up. I have to write it down but I have to keep moving, I have to remain present and attuned to my surroundings but I must also turn inward to hold onto the words while I get them down in my singular, endlessly distracting device. Give and take requires giving and taking, which I don’t think I’ve quite figured out yet. I’ll have my cake and eat it too and take a photo of it and sell it for social currency and come back for seconds and divine my future in the crumbs then feed those crumbs to the pigeons. I’m a hungry creature is what I’m saying, I want everything and am driven mad that I must compromise all of it.

I try my hardest not to make winter my antagonist but it’s how I was raised. Just the threat of snow would have my mother pulling at her hair when I was a kid and it was difficult to blame her. There was the always looming threat of financial strain in our old house with poor insulation and sagging roofs, and then the long, crumbling driveway which required copious shoveling, and every important parental task delayed by caution and the potential lunacy of other drivers. It’s been my mission since I stepped into adulthood to unravel that instinct to see the winter, the cold, the snow, as inconvenience. Convenience is boring. How awfully unexciting would the world be if it all looked the same from day to day; if we were never required to adjust to anything it would all lapse into miles of unengaging blankness, none of the things that texture a life on earth. I want to accept the seasons as they are, let them do their work and be informed by it but this unraveling is long work and I’m fighting that desire to scorn inconvenience once again now that my walking has been impacted. It’s the one thing I’ve got that is supposed to be light and effortless.

There are Georgia peach panties frozen in a snowbank. Striped beach chairs cosplaying cars in poorly shoveled parking spots. The sidewalks are made to shirk my feet, my path around the reservoir is dirty and tedious, the days shorter than an inhale, the breath of winter stings and needles the skin and all the while the miles of snow reject the sunlight and force the eyes to narrow. How’s a boy to think with his eyes half-closed? I’m managing but it is maintenance. I must settle for short laps around the neighborhood, body so bundled I am reduced to a bug’s lack of imagination. All that the wide world inspires is narrowed to a selective tunnel of vision. To catch words in midair and write them down is to subject my only fingers to the wind and its numbing caress. Is this suffering? I keep coming back for more of it, so perhaps not. It’s a symptom of my living. If I hadn’t chosen life in this particular corner of the bordered world I would be finding and wrestling with discomfort in its other endless forms in a different place, a different life, thinking different thoughts down different pathways and maybe finding something novel in it, maybe catching better sentences. But those sentences aren’t mine; this is what I’ve got and what I’ve got somehow manages to never leave me dissatisfied. The seasons don’t care about my walking, my thought generating. They have their own work to do and it does not involve me even when it impedes me. I have a choice: sink into frustrated lethargy or put one foot in front of the other at the risk of falling. The larger metaphor has found me against my will.

As I write this I’m gearing up for a walk. I’m thinking, I’ve got all these words down and they’ll change the moment I put my foot to the concrete and feel salt crunch beneath my soles, see the snow glistening, changing phase under the noontime sky, the reservoir all frosted over and sparse without the bird forms that populate it in the summer and make it pulse with life. All of this will evolve the moment I step away from it. These sentiments will not be negated but I’ll see them as suddenly foreign—what sedentary stationary man thought any of this to be important? It will become much clearer then. I’ve got my gaze thrown ten steps ahead. What I find there is not for you, I’m afraid to say. It is for me, and the cold, the winter and the precarity it places underfoot, the present unfolding and thoughts populating can only be a single moment in time which will feel slow and frustrating as I pick my way through it but which I will miss later when sense memory rouses it like sediment from the riverbed.

This is what I mean by walking: traversing a moment and continuously leaving it behind. Choosing movement, choosing to be a manifest presence on the world, choosing to leave the shape of my boot in my wake, left and then right, and so on. Every step carries me not into the future but deeper into the moment, the continuum of my temporarily expanding mind. To walk is to make myself larger and the world, too. I hope when I die I am walking. I hope I am deep in thought, lost in motion, caught up in the euphoria of creating, so when I go—because I must go, eventually—it won’t feel like leaving this place or entering some unknown. It will be like stepping forward. It will be like wading deeper into the snow and trusting that blinding white will hold me. It is now and always now.

the world that you love to behold / cannot hold you anymore

Thanks for reading. Haven’t done this in a while but there are lots of new faces around here who might not know I have a book and you can buy it with your money. It’s about complicated people reckoning with the realities of violence and searching for free will. It feels relevant, I think. Read it, review it, tell me what it made you feel. Appreciate you being here. jw.