Long Walks On Leafy Streets

11/3/2014 Tuckerman St NW, Washington, DC
It is a quiet fall night here. Except for some distant drumming and the occasional rumble of the train, I can only hear my own thoughts. Perhaps they are playing some music at the Coolidge High School stadium, about half a mile away. They do that sometimes when they have a football game or similar event going on. Or maybe someone is playing his or her music too loud. In any case, I enjoy moments like these. It is very conducive to contemplation and concentration.
I am learning that concentrating on a task is similar to how you focus on the breath (or your steps) when you go running. At first the body maybe tired and it may protest a bit. But once you get into a rhythm of proper breathing and you have run a few hundred yards the body settles down. There is energy that comes from the increased circulation of oxygen in the blood and you start enjoying it.
As you make one step after another, focusing on the breath and the steps, you stop worrying about how you are going to finish the race. The miles just keep rolling by. Similarly, a certain task may feel difficult or intimidating at first. But once you get started, and focus on the action in front of you, you stop worrying. The work gathers its own energy. It was so with the grant writing a couple of weeks ago. Although this is the first major grant proposal that I have written and I didn’t like it much, once I got going I started enjoying it. I even started taking pleasure in creating an elegant structure in the writing.
In this I have learned quite a bit from my mother. She has been with us for about two months now. Every morning she gets up at dawn and gets to work. She is seventy-one now but works as tirelessly as someone half her age. Part of her energy comes, I think, from her devotion to God. Her faith is very strong. The Gods are very present for her, as much as say the Coach of a football team is to his or her players, and keep her going. But partly it is also I think simply following a good routine and the force of will to keep working. As I said above, once you start working you gain energy from it. Most people who are successful in life have both of these qualities. If you do not have a good routine and cannot drive yourself to work then you cannot manage your time well or get anything done. The motivation and drive have to come from within.
I have also been doing more contemplation lately. Partly because I have been inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth.” It is a book that I have been reading with a few members of the Washington Mindfulness Community (WMC) -- I wrote about WMC in the previous post. In this book he talks about overcoming the ego and negative emotions coming from the past by focusing fully on the present moment. Now focusing on one’s work can help you in doing that to some extent. But to understand one’s true nature and the true meaning of life one has to go deeper, and be mindful every moment. If you can do that it gives you a great feeling of joy and relief from the constant worrying about what you have or don’t have, what happened in the past or what will happen in the future.
It is with such an attitude that I embarked on the bike ride that I had organized for yesterday, through the Nature Lovers’ Meetup. This was a repeat of the one I did a few weeks ago that was affected by the rain. This time also we were hit by bad weather. The morning started very cold and windy, and there was a forecast of rain. But having decided to enjoy the ride and the company of whoever came, I was able to do just that. My good friend Manuel joined me, as did Mart who has been to several of our events. Mart is a unique person. He lives a very free spirited life, mostly by himself but not because he is unsociable. He spends a lot of time hiking in the woods and has even lived in rural Alaska by himself for a while supporting himself by hunting and gathering. We biked briskly on the Metropolitan Brach Trail and then on Pennsylvania Ave. After the ride we had a great lunch and conversations at the Sweetgreen restaurant in Dupont Circle. I then joined a few marchers who had been marching for several months all the way from Los Angeles. They were trying to draw attention to the need to act on Climate Change. They ended their march in front of the White House and read messages from people they had met along the way. One of the speakers quoted Gandhi who said “What you do may seem insignificant but it is very important that you do it.”
That is certainly the creed I am trying to live by, these days. I am trying to not worry about the results of my work but simply enjoy doing it. I want to put in my best effort and take pride in every little task. I want to do it lovingly and try to make at least one person happy each day. I talked to some people at the march, one of whom turned out to be the Iranian young man whom I had met on the bus from the Climate March in New York. He said he had recently gotten a job and that made me happy. I started biking back to the metro but then my old love of biking came back to me and I biked all the way back home, enjoying the cool windy fall day.

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