Walk Through Town

I once saw someone compare the mind of the average love-drunk couple with a vial of water mixed with dust and glitter, which are supposed to represent the cocktail of various neurochemicals that are released during the process of falling for someone. When we are in love, our minds kicks up this mixture into a swirl and we can no longer quite view reality clearly. It is only once this mixture is given time to settle that we can consider our minds to be anywhere close to a normal state. In the case of lovesickness, this process takes about six to nine months and is the cause of certain societal idiosyncrasies such as rom-coms and Vegas weddings.

But I think this analogy works well for other features of the mind as well, such as the state I find myself in when I have done far too much over the span of the week and am finding it difficult to bring myself into a resting state. It’s like too many things have been dumped into my mind for me to properly handle, so the water gets murky. I sometimes try to solve this problem by exchanging the heavy, hard things I’m adding with supposedly lighter, happier ones, usually by scrolling though social media or playing games on my computer, but oftentimes this doesn’t help the problem. I need to stop dumping things into my mind in the first place and just give the water time to settle before adding anything else. Today was one of those days, so I closed my computer and went on at twenty minute walk that quickly expanded into a two hour one.

As much as I like new information and experiences, I think some of the most peaceful moments of my life have been after I have spent a day or two out in the woods. I don’t just think this is because of the impact of greenery on the brain, or the sunshine, or being with friends for an extended period of time, though those factors certainly help. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it gives enough time for the water to truly settle. In the most anxious period of my life, I remember wondering, while kayaking with a few friends during a campout, whether I was even allowed to feel that at-peace with such little effort. We lack space to breathe, to allow our thoughts to slow and our minds to truly rest.

The speed of my thoughts was the first thing I noticed on my walk. They do not always come that fast, or with that intensity, but I had to remind myself of that fact during the first bit of my outing. All of the stressful ideas and feeling that had subsisted in the background for so long came to the surface and finally found expression with little further input as a result, which would only have muddied the waters more. It’s amazing how much even a thirty minute break from any kind of consumption will slow the mind down. Even stranger is how difficult it seems to be to get that sort of break to begin with. Thirty minutes doing nothing but walking and listening to one’s own thoughts is a rarer occurrence than I think we give it credit for.

Even after that time my thoughts only slowed somewhat, but their racing current found paths to travel aside from my own tired anxieties and fixations, especially once I decided to take my walk into a part of town that I often drive though, but rarely traverse on foot. I’m certainly not the first person to make the observation that there is a lot more to be experienced on foot than can ever be taken in by car. Areas that rush by in seconds now take several minutes to traverse. It leaves time to actually reflect and notice what’s nearby. There are entire ecosystems and stories scattered around just one city block. We don’t notice them because we never touch them from the insides of our cars. They might as well be foreign nations. After all, we spend most of our lives gliding over the surface of these spaces without actually touching them. I almost wonder if our loneliness epidemic would vanish with a return to pedestrian travel. There’s no chance to truly meet people when you’re segregated by steel and aluminum shells. In any case, the homeless I passed on my way didn’t seem to have a loneliness problem. Bedraggled as they were, I often saw them sitting in huddles, bound together by common circumstance or location or goodness knows what else. Kind of like how high schoolers become friends solely because they share a class or two, then forget one another after graduation. All it takes is a common venue to bind people together, and the streets must certainly provide something of the sort.

I’m not saying mass homelessness is the solution to the loneliness epidemic or that we should abdicate the use of automobiles entirely. I happen to like driving as much as I like walking, as well as things like showers, air conditioning, and not freezing to death sleeping in bus stops and alleyways. It’s simply worth noting that we have traded those troubles for others by living the lives we live now. In order to solve problems, new problems must inevitably be created, and one can only hope that we are trading up instead of down.

In any case, I learned a lot about the few blocks of city that stand just outside my neighborhood on my walk. For perhaps the first time in my entire life, I really thought about the office building that stands on the street corner across from where the landscape switches from neighborhood to commercial space. I’ve driven by that all my life, but I’ve never actually thought about what it is or what it means. Someone made a deliberate choice to build that building, and someone else made a deliberate choice to rent it for goodness knows what reason. There are people who may have spent months or years of their lives there working some kind of office job. Perhaps lifelong friendships or even romantic relationships have blossomed between the people there, and I’ve driven by it a thousand times without ever thinking about it. I also found a tiny shop on a corner that seems to sell nothing but indoor lighting for homes. It was a mom-and-pop shop from what I can tell, which means that at some point, someone deliberately chose to devote their career to the distribution of something I take for granted. Such a person must, I imagine, be some kind of savant of indoor lighting. Perhaps the nuances of electric lighting contain all the complexity of a broad science such as psychology or biology, and I’ll probably never so much as dip my feet in. But perhaps the most striking thing I found was a bit of something that can barely be called graffiti. Etched into the dust on the side of an electrical box I found the words “Psalm 88” inscribed. For those who don’t know, this psalm is not exactly the most uplifting thing to read. It is essentially a cry for help to God in a moment of turmoil. One has to read between the lines to see any glimmer of hope in it. There are only a few things I can know with any degree of certainty about whoever made that bit of graffiti. They probably had at least some level of biblical knowledge, and they probably had a specific reason to write that psalm. They most definitely wanted to communicate something to whoever walked by, though I can only guess as to what. In my mind, graffiti is usually linked to some sort of rebellion or resentment against the systems of the society it is found in. It is, after all, an act of vandalism. Graffiti has an edge to it, a tint of anger or at least defiance of some sort. Combined with the text of the psalm, one can imagine the mental state of whoever wrote it. Certainly, they must have been someone in a difficult space. Perhaps it was drawn by a homeless person. This is not as surprising as one might think. After all, the homeless are one of the most evangalized people groups in the country. I like this idea, because it breaks the illusion that the homeless are unintelligent. In this case, the person who drew the graffiti must have been cognizant and knowledgeable enough to make an allusion to one of the most widely read and respected books in the world. Not only that, but they must have expected others to make some sort of interpretation based on it. Beyond that, it also challenges the notion that they are hopeless. Because Psalm 88 may be desperate, but it is not without hope. It’s a prayer, offered with the expectation of an answer. People do not pray without hope. Even if part of them has given up, the act itself implies a piece of their soul is still hanging on. In a sense, that piece of graffiti was its own prayer. I will never know who etched it, but I will remember them all the same.