Long Walks On Leafy Streets

5/2/2015 Kansas Ave at Sheridan St NE, Washington, DC
I still haven’t quite grasped the fact that our son is a living, breathing, feeling, perhaps even thinking human being in his mother’s womb. I know it for a fact, but it has not entered my consciousness as a concrete part of reality, yet. He still remains a black, white and gray image in a sonogram. With every passing day, however, he becomes more real. Any day now he will be coming out into the world.

We are still finishing up all the preparation work that Nicole had mapped out. After much effort and delay and drama the combined roof and central AC work has been completed. I just finished painting the baby room, with help from my father. It has been an extremely hectic week. Yesterday (Friday) morning I woke up after a short slumber to type up the budget for a grant proposal.
After cooking lunch for the family, I started walking towards the bus stop to catch the shuttle bus to the College Park campus of the University of Maryland. My eyes were heavy with sleep and my head was aching a little bit. But walking in the pleasant spring afternoon in the verdant neighborhoods of Takoma Park was very refreshing. I was even able to come up with some good ideas to solve my research problem. Then later in the evening I spent an hour in the backyard pulling out weeds and cutting the grass. As mentioned frequently on these pages, there is nothing as healing for the mind and body as working outside in the garden.

Nevertheless the fatigue combined with all the stress from the past week caused my mind to be very turbulent. Various conflicts and disappointments sloshed around inside it. But as I kept working it slowed down a bit. The physical exercise got the blood flowing and cleared up the brain. It was very satisfying to see the yard all tidied up. I felt good about myself. I realized that I had nothing to be disappointed about. Perhaps I had been not as focused and determined in reaching my goals as others. Perhaps I lack the extra level of intelligence. But all my life I have strived to be honest and help people whenever I can. Ultimately, what matters in life is the quest for true meaning and service to others. When you get closer to the true meaning of life, you also feel a certain love for all beings. Reaching goals, however lofty, whether material or spiritual, is no different from someone building up his body through exercise. It could be noble to set goals and reach them, whatever they might be, as long as you are not attached to them. Otherwise, there is no difference between the man who saves the world and the man who spends all his life shining others’ shoes. The path to understanding the real nature of life will become clear only if the thorny bushes of desire and ambition are first removed. But does not the man who saves the world do good to the world, you might ask? Absolutely yes. But if you truly understand life, you will see that the man who only shines shoes also does an equal amount of good.

Today I led a hike from the Georgetown marina and harbor to its counterpart in Alexandria. It was a picture perfect day. Eleven of us from Sierra Club outings as well as the Nature Lovers Meetup met at the waterfront where there were festive crowds waiting to watch a regatta. We walked along the Mt. Vernon trail to Alexandria, visiting remnants of the aqueduct and canal that once linked the C&O canal and Georgetown harbor to the Alexandria harbor. On the way back I was passing through a little grove of trees in Arlington just before the entrance to the Key Bridge. Walking under those trees with leaves and twigs under my feet reminded me of hiking in the woods. For a fleeting moment it transported me to a place of serene and sublime beauty. I remembered what I felt when I was hiking in a Canadian forest in the middle of winter about twenty years ago. It was a time of great restlessness within me and as a young graduate who had recently started teaching at Howard I was trying to find my place in the world. I had stopped in that forest on my way back from to the US. That silence and the solitude uplifted my mind beyond its material existence and convinced me that this is my place in the world. That conviction has not changed to this day. In my mind, I am always a wanderer in the woods, seeking to reach that eternal spirit who lives in every being.

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