A typical April walk in Seattle. Flowers flowering, and buds budding. A bit colder than the usual April afternoon. A light breeze against my face. Dark clouds, threatening rain that never arrived, at least until hours after I arrived home.
I was half enjoying the sights, and half letting my mind wander -- planning future travels, doing financial planning (not unrelated to those same travels), mulling my own mortality ...
Whoops! Where did that come from? An unwelcome intrusion of thoughts, maybe, but it led to some rewarding contemplations.
I breathed in deeply the crisp air, directed my focus to the springtime beauties of the neighborhoods through which I was walking, and realized that a time would inevitably come -- not tomorrow, but sooner that it would have seemed five years ago -- when walks such as this would be only memories. I might well find my life narrowed and -- at best -- confined to an assisted care facility.
I thought of my mother who lived in such a facility -- a very nice one -- for about three years before her death. Like me, she had been something of a walker, at least, certaintly, around our home town. But her walking was now restricted to the quiet, beige halls of her facility -- beige and maybe intentionally bland and non-threatening. And certainly non-stimulating. Nature was whatever she could see outside her window. We took her for a drive one day, and parked overlooking the Columbia river. "It's beautiful," she exclaimed. As it was, but not so beautiful that we had ever thought much about it.
Which, I realized, is how I was reacting to the amazingly varied and attractive sights I was striding past today. Beautiful, sure, but so what? It's always beautiful, even in the dead of winter. And I do appreciate that beauty, but I should appreciate it more intently.
"Mindfulness" in today's jargon. Paying attention to what you see and experience. Before it's too late.
In three weeks, I'm traveling alone to Italy. Mainly to the Cinque Terre, with some additional time in Rome and Florence. And, yes, I plan to return to my practice of keeping a travel journal. Such a journal has two purposes: first, to preserve memories for future enjoyment, and second, to encourage yourself to really see what you are looking act, to feel what you are experiencing, to appreciate the uniqueness and complexity of people whom you meet.
A travel journal is not a new concept for me. I've kept journals during many travels, beginning with scribbled summaries of the day's activities as an undergraduate, and progressing to lengthier reflections on my recorded activities as I grew older. I later typed up a number of those travel journals, which I've never ceased to enjoy re-reading over the years.
My only regret is that I didn't record my impressions and feelings about every one of the many trips and hikes I've taken. The journeys that I did journal seem random -- some, not surprisingly, were trips when I was traveling alone, and had more incentive and opportunity to write. Nothing makes me more at ease when dining alone than scribbling away in a notebook between courses. I recently re-read a journal I kept in 1999 of a trip to Central Europe; my entries written during meals in Prague and near Budapest vividly reminded me not only of the surroundings I was observing, but also of my pleasure in writing about it while writing about it and -- to be truthful -- in being observed writing.
But I also have written fairly detailed journals on trips where I was traveling with a large number of friends and/or relatives, such as family trips to Italy and canoeing in France. When I felt like writing, I could always find time, although those journals tended to be more often summaries of what had occurred over the past day or so, lacking the immediacy of thoughts about my surroundings even as they were observed. While sitting in a Czech café, for example, or while sitting on a boulder staring down at a bubbling creek near Dresden.
In any event, I'll be alone in Italy, with only my hiking shoes and my journal to keep me company. I hope to be "mindful," hope not to be one of those who have "eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear..." And, even more, I hope to be reflective.
It's my hope that, once my journal is written, and self-edited, and finally typed up, I'll discover -- as the ancient Chinese poet suggested -- that those two weeks in Italy have, like magic, been lived twice.
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