I Miss Walking

His name was Jackson. And his butt wagged because he had no tail.

I miss walking. I don't refer to walking for the sake of leisure (something I dislike). I miss walking to class and to work, walking to the grocery store and to friends' dorms without feeling rushed or hurried. I already knew the length of time to get there, the pace to set. The time in between was free time to simply exist. It wasn't time that I set apart for myself like walking for leisure. It was a space that already existed in my daily routine.

It was a space crafted out of familiarity. And it was carved out by being in a single place long enough to begin to know that place. In Wendell Berry's essay, "Life Is A Miracle," he mourns the shift of higher academia from equipping the individual to better serve the community the person has come from to career development and "professionalism" (Berry 130). Because career has become greater than community, we find a new trend of moving in order to achieve our career goals, regardless of what it might mean for the community in which we presently exist:

 The context of professionalism is not a place or a community but a career, and all the evils that proceed from it. The religion of professionalism is progress, and this means that, in spite of its vocal bias in favor of practicality and realism, professionalism forsakes both past and present in favor of the future, which is never present or practical or real. (Berry 130)

 We find that we always sacrifice the past and the present to the future. Berry is never in favor of large solutions to large problems. So he instead offers a small one: familiarity. For "science and art... that served settlement rather than exploitation of 'frontiers' would be subordinate to reverence, fidelity, neighborliness, and stewardship, to affection and delight" (Berry 135). And this is not a condemnation of travel, but an argument that humans are not by nature nomadic, nor is culture or religion or art or science. These are all local.

And they can't be manufactured. In Beginning To Pray, a woman approaches Father Anthony Bloom saying that she has prayed almost unceasingly and has never felt the presence of God. He then instructs her to tidy her room  and "for fifteen minutes knit before the face of God," in silence. And what she finds out is that it works; the space that she has created through familiarity is there for her to exist in (Bloom 92-93).

This is the thing that I miss. I am so far from everything. From church and work and friends and family. I had grown accustomed to walking--even before college--to church and the movies and stores and friend's houses. And these walks were sacred times and had become holy moments for me. Now, they do not exist. There is nowhere for me to reasonably walk. The people I work with, the family I have, the church I belong to, all seem disconnected in some way.

I am in agreement with Wendell Berry in believing that big solutions only create greater problems. I think that in the moments that are here in familiarity, the spaces open, which never replace walking, can perhaps sprout some new stillness and roots of being local. I need a new way of being still.