Musings from a stroll
I happened to be strolling through River Terrace Park on a beautiful Fall morning with my wife and our infant son in a stroller. Fall is my favorite season. It was an accidental walk: we were supposed to be on a tour, but there was some mix-up with the location, so we decided to take a walk by ourselves.
The park runs along the Anacostia River. A paved bike trail runs through green grass studded with big trees. The trees were all red, yellow and brown, and so was the ground, covered in fallen leaves. You could see the marsh reeds along the river swaying in the wind.
Memories came flooding back of so many other walks, hikes and bike rides I had taken through parks in the past. It made me a bit sad to think that I will never visit many of these places again; some of their names I have already forgotten.
As I’m writing this, I’m remembering how much I love writing. Writing is cathartic and deeply meaningful to me, and yet I do it so erratically — so many abandoned journals and blogs. Life always gets in the way. There’s a to-do item that needs to be done, a deadline for a class, a chore around the house. I understand now that if there is something you love, you have to design your life around it. If you try to fit it into the gaps in your life, you’ll never find the time to do it. Life will keep pushing you in directions you don’t want to drift, and you’ll miss out on all the things you always wanted to do, all the words left unsaid, all the stories untold.
I wonder if life has always been like this, or if this disease of busyness has been inflicted upon us by technology. I can’t help but think of American Gods and how we have now come to worship a new god who demands our constant attention. It feels like an addiction, like we crave feeling busy. Maybe we always had this craving, and only now has it become possible to satisfy it.
The most direct cause of this disease is multitasking. It is quite well established that human beings cannot multitask; instead we switch rapidly between contexts, and context switching is draining. You might not feel it in the moment, but after an hour of innocuous multitasking you are probably left feeling dead and rotten inside for the rest of the day. The walk that morning was the opposite: there was nothing to do but push the stroller and look at the leaves. Writing feels like that to me, one thing done slowly and all the way through.
I have tried journaling about my trips, but I’m not good at keeping a routine, so I’m just going to write whatever I feel like, whenever I can, all out of order. I will write about the various trips I’ve taken in the past and the ones I am yet to take in the future.