david taus

Walk The Path

music: Townes Van Zandt- Live at the Old Quarter

I caught myself trying to do nine things at once today: laundry, troubleshooting the electronic crackle in my guitar amp, purging unused clothes from my drawers, pulling down three concerts from archive.org, boiling ravioli for dinner, fixing a zipper, checking my bank statement against my receipts, unloading the dish rack, and worst of all, making a list of all the things I had to do tonight (check about the table hockey game I ordered, go grocery shopping, write a quiz that the kids are taking tomorrow, write a rent check and drop it off, call a guitar technician I know about amp repair, refill migraine prescription).

Ridiculous.

This is the time of year when things gain momentum. School is sliding into its final days. I’m beginning to think about summer. The warmer weather (whenever it comes) catalyzes all life’s reactions. There’s a lot to get done and a short time in which to do it all.

Some people are able to handle having thirty things going at once; I can handle it as well but not happily. I’m the type to order my obligations by relative importance and then run down the list, checking them off one by one. It’s a sign of my mental health when I crave order and productivity enough to start up with the lists, but these days lists grow long and untended. And even though I work my way through them they seem to grow longer such that I never seem to make much headway.

In the midst of all this personal entropy I started to reorganize the cookware cabinet because it was pissing me off how the lesser-used stuff ended up in the front and the big mixing bowls were balanced on top of the smaller ones. I stopped about 30 seconds into the exercise because the ravioli was done and the shows finished downloading and I resigned myself to the fact that in three or so days things would be in a similar state of chaos.

In doing nine things at once I don’t really get any one thing done well. This life of mine has me turning in my hamster wheel something fierce.

Part of the crush I experienced today was because I skipped town to go hiking in the Green Mountains this weekend. The trip to the backcountry afforded me some time and space to meditate and ruminate, to let my mind process so many backed-up thoughts. In high school I made a point to take about an hour before bed every night to sit with a cup of tea and just think-let my mind wander here and there, let it delve into corners of my psyche that needed attention-but there just isn’t time for that sort of thing anymore. Quiet unstructured thinking time has become an extravagance. Hiking, however, provides me with that opportunity again. Hiking itself is a meditation for me-an amount of physical exertion mixed with a self-sufficient philosophy put to practice and a very, very long path to walk as slow as I please. There is no thrill to hiking the way there is to rock climbing or whitewater paddling; you just walk. You walk the path and think. Sometimes after struggling uphill you catch a nice view, but there is no opportunity or reason to do more than walk. Spending time walking through the wilderness gives me that space to let my mind grind and digest all the stuff that it needs to.

It usually takes about three days to acclimate to the backcountry lifestyle, to clear my head of the bombarding demands of regular life, to have my ears stop their city-noise-cancelling ring and be able to actually listen, to get used to sleeping on the ground, to drop into a calm and focused and crystalline mental state. By the third morning of the weekend I was approaching this goal but had to cut off the exercise and come back to Boston. I spent a good deal of yesterday nursing an incredible migraine and spent most of today mopping up all those little details of post-post-modern living that I left scattered last Friday.

This is a time of transition, which doesn’t make things any easier. But my transitions are more internal and seasonally routine than others. I spent my time in the mountains with two friends: one from Boston who won’t be here much longer, one an old roommate from college who I don’t see nearly enough. We three had a positive time, but in our conversations and in my own meditations while hiking I was reminded how much is in transition right now across the board. Jojo is moving to a new and unfamiliar city for a boy. Evan just graduated law school. Each had their own reasons and needs to be up in the mountains and meditate, perhaps more reason than my pedestrian lists of errands, but from my perspective it was good to spend some time with my friends. They are two examples of this flux in my extended circle: another college roommate just received his M.D., and another is off to become a Broadway actor. My sister just shed the majority of her material possessions and is now making her way out of the deserts of Arizona to start her adult life. Things are afoot at home as well- one roommate has already moved out, with at least two more on the way out by summer’s end. What of the countless other individual lives out there swinging through transitions of all kinds this time of year?

We all walk some sort of path, but most of the time we’re so distracted by computers and dirty clothes and bank statements and boiling ravioli to realize we are — right now — in the middle of our journeys. Given the chance to simplify and literally walk the path, the more basic terms of our journey comes into focus for a brief moment. I walk up and down mountains and canyons with 50 lbs on my back, in part, to work myself into this perspective. (That and the chance to catch a view of some fantastic scenery.) The rest of my time on the path is spent oblivious that there is a journey beyond what has to get done for today or tomorrow. And here again, late into Tuesday night, a good hour and a half after I would have liked to be in bed, I’m scrambling, trying to go nine directions at once, not keeping up with my own lists, trying to make these microtransitions as smoothly as possible, stumbling over myself, stretching for that mental place I cultivated nightly in high school and daily on-trail, and trying to remember the lesson from this past weekend in the woods: all I have to do is walk.

Posted by davidtaus at May 31, 2005 11:14 PM | TrackBack