Getting lost on purpose

The sun has been off this ridge for about twenty minutes and the shadow side of the cove has gone blue. That’s my favorite part of the day and it lasts about as long as a kettle.

I am walking up a creek bed with no trail in it. There is no path here. I’m the one making the path.

At the fork in the gravel road back at the bottom I had a choice I’ve probably made four hundred times.

Left goes up onto the ridge. Right goes down and around by the water.

I’ve never once taken the right one.

So this afternoon I took the right one. On purpose.

Then I parked at the end of it and got out and stood there like a man who has just made a decision.

He’d now like somebody to explain that decision to him.

Here’s the part I didn’t plan. I didn’t take a bearing before I started. I didn’t note which way the truck was pointed. I didn’t tell anybody anything.

I did not bring my phone. That part was on purpose.

Everything after that was just what happens when a man is pleased with himself.

So then Bo is out in front of me somewhere in the dark, doing the only sensible thing available.

He is a hundred feet ahead at most. I can hear his collar every ten or fifteen seconds.

That’s the sound of a dog who isn’t lost.

The light is going off the trees now. Everything above my shoulders is one flat grey and everything below it is turning that blue.

There’s a bit of wind coming up the drainage. That’s new. It didn’t do that this morning.

Here is the question for today.

Why does a walk go better when I cannot tell you where I am going to end up?

I want to be honest about how little I know about that question. I’ve got three guesses and only one of them has anything behind it.

Guess one is about my body.

If I know where I’m going, then some part of me is steering the whole time. My shoulders are up about a quarter inch and I don’t know it.

When I don’t know where the truck is, nobody is steering. My shoulders come down about a mile in.

That’s a thing I can see in a mirror. It’s not an answer.

Guess two is worse. When I don’t promise myself a view, then nothing on this ridge can disappoint me. And I’ve gotten into trouble my whole life by promising myself views.

Guess three is the one I went looking for, and it’s the one with a book behind it.

I’m borrowing here, and I’m standing outside the whole old tradition while I do it, which is the polite way of saying I am borrowing.

The name is Zhuangzi. That’s the name for an old Chinese book, and also the name some people say for the man who wrote it.

Chinese. Fourth century before our era.

I’m not going to try to say his line. I’m going to say mine.

There’s a tree in it. That’s the part I’ve carried around for years.

It is a big tree standing by a road, and nobody has ever cut it down.

Not because it is protected, because it is no good. The wood would not make a plank. It’s the wrong shape for anything, and there is no timber in it that a person could sell.

So it just stands there, year after year. The road goes past it and everybody agrees it is worthless.

And the book asks a fair question about that. If the world keeps its promises, why is the worthless tree the one still standing?

There is a bird in the story too. Hold on to the tree, though.

The bird is only the example. The tree is the argument.

Here’s my version of the whole idea, and I’ve made it shorter and plainer than he made it.

A thing that cannot be used does not have to be defended.

It’s not on trial. Nobody has to argue for it. It has no opinion about anything, and it isn’t paying anybody anything, so nobody is asking it to justify its week.

It just stands by the road while the world goes by.

And the going by is fine.

Now I’ve got to be careful here, because this is the exact spot where a guy on a ridge turns into a fortune cookie.

I’m not saying go be useless. I’ve tried being useless. Bo has tried being useless. It did not go well.

What I’m saying is narrower than that.

When I take a fork I know I’m choosing, I have to be a person who knows things. I have to be right about the grade. I have to have a reason for the fork.

Take the fork I know is a mistake, and I’m something else. I’m just a person out in the weather finding out.

That is a different animal. I do not have to be competent at it.

Bo agrees with this completely. He has never once in his life gone up a creek bed for a reason.

That’s where I went looking next.

A big useless tree is a nice story, and I wanted to know whether anybody had ever tried to check one.

The name is Galileo. A man from Pisa, born in fifteen sixty four, dead in sixteen forty two.

Italian. The sixteen hundreds.

Here’s the situation he was standing in, and this part matters more than the telescope does.

Everybody agreed about the sky.

Not everybody agreed in a sloppy way. They agreed carefully.

Scholars had measured the same things and argued for a long time, and they ended up in the same place.

The sky was smooth, unchanging, and finished being a subject about three hundred years before he was born.

And that’s what a settled thing sounds like from the inside. It sounds like knowing.

Now put a lens on it.

That’s all he did, and it’s a smaller move than people make it sound. He did not argue better. He put a piece of glass on the end of a tube and made the disagreement visible.

And the first thing that showed up was that the moon has hills on it. Not marks somebody painted on it. Actual mountains, with their own shadows moving across the face of it as the light changed.

And the mountains were bigger than anybody had pictured. That’s the part that cracked it.

If the moon has real mountains and real shadows, then it is a place. Then the arithmetic that said the heavens were made of a different stuff than the dirt under your boots has a problem in it.

Nobody could argue with a shadow. You can’t talk a shadow out of anything.

Then he turned the same lens on Jupiter, and that’s the night I would pay money to have watched.

There were three little lights beside it that were not stars. He came back the next night and the three had moved. He came back a third night and there were four of them, and the four kept changing places.

Stars don’t do that. Nothing had ever been seen up there doing that.

So here’s the thing the story usually leaves out. He didn’t get the moon being a place, and he didn’t stop there and celebrate.

He got a thing in the sky going around something other than the earth. In the months after he turned the tube on Jupiter, more people got hold of his lens than had ever held one before.

And what they found, mostly, was that the settled sky was not settled.

So here’s what I take from him, in my own words, because I’m not going to say his.

The whole method is one move.

Take the thing everybody agrees on. Put the thing you can measure next to it. Then let the measurement vote, even if the measurement is small and stupid and only works if you look through it at the right hour.

That is it. That’s the whole trick, and it’s available to anybody with a Tuesday and a question.

The other half of it is the part I would not have believed if I’d only read about it.

He built arguments he could lose.

As far as I know, he did not go out and find things that supported him. He went out looking for the thing that would embarrass him if he was wrong about the moon.

That’s a different posture than most of us manage on a Tuesday. Most of us go looking for the thing that lets us keep going.

And this is where the ridge comes back in, so hold on to the tree and let Galileo finish his sentence.

I went up this drainage looking for something I could not explain.

That is a bad way to spend an evening, and I found what I found.

Here is the honest part. Nothing happened.

The tree by the road in that old book is in a book. It has been standing there for two thousand years and it is doing fine.

The mountains on the moon are real and they are on the moon.

And I’m standing in a creek bed at dusk in Missouri, and nothing on this ridge is about to be checked by anybody.

That’s the cost of it, and I want to put it in the open instead of pretending I have a system.

I do not have a telescope. Nobody is going to grade my creek bed.

And there is a second cost, and it is not a small one, and I’m not going to talk around it.

The phrase getting lost on purpose is a good phrase, and good phrases are how people get hurt.

Getting lost on purpose is a different thing from getting lost. One of them you chose. The other one chose you.

I want to say the part I actually know, which is a hard creek bed on a wet evening comes up faster than you think.

I’ve done this exact walk in the dark twice. Both times I could hear water before I could see the road.

If I had gone up that drainage an hour later, I would not have walked out of it at all. Not because anything was hunting me. Because it is a bad place to be sitting down in the dark.

So there’s a version of tonight that ends with somebody in a truck at nine o’clock.

And the question they ask you is one you would rather not answer.

I have been the guy in the truck. I don’t enjoy being on that end of it.

There’s also the other cost, and I’m not going to talk about it lightly.

For some people not knowing is not a joke and not a freedom. It’s just the day they are already having.

Not everybody can take tonight the way I took it. Some of us are already lost, and being lost is not a joke.

If your house burned down and you are the one out walking at night, please do not stop by a road admiring a worthless tree.

That is a fact and not advice from a man on a ridge.

The whole thing is about the two of us. That’s where this is for.

What I did about the dark, since it’s practical and takes ten seconds.

I said out loud where I was going before I went. Out loud, to a person, not in my head.

I gave myself a time. When the light goes off the tops of the trees, I turn around. Not because the walk is sacred.

That’s the boring part that makes the rest of it possible.

I turned around when I said I would, which is the first good decision I made all evening.

The walk back took longer than it should have. My left leg got heavy about halfway and it stayed heavy the whole way down.

But I can tell you what was in there, and I wouldn’t have found any of it from the ridge road.

A sycamore with its feet in the water and its bark coming off in long pale strips.

A stretch of old fence wire, four foot high, going through the brush in a straight line where nobody has walked in forty years.

Three rusted buckets stacked at the edge of a field that is not a field anymore.

And a pipe coming out of the ground, and cold water running off the end of it into a hole in the rock.

That last one is a spring. Somebody found it before me and somebody set a pipe on it, and I’ve walked within forty yards of it for years without knowing.

Here is the thing I could not do.

I could not check any of it. Not one piece. Not the fence, not the buckets, not where the water comes out of.

So what did I get out of being wrong all evening?

This, and it is smaller than I wanted it to be.

I did not spend the whole time being a man who had made a mistake.

I spent about nine minutes being that, and I would like to skip those nine minutes. The rest of it I spent looking at a fence nobody has walked along in forty years.

That is the whole thing the tree was telling me and I had to walk into a creek bed in the dark to hear it.

A thing does not have to earn its place every day.

Nobody is grading the sycamore. It is not going on a list. It is just standing there by the water being the only white-barked thing for a mile, and it does not have an opinion about it.

Now let me put this where you live, because a creek bed in Missouri is not going to help anybody much.

You already know what to do with not knowing. You have been doing it for years and you are probably better at it than you give yourself credit for.

You went into a new job not knowing anybody. You moved somewhere and did not know a street. You had a conversation last month where you said I do not know and did not fix it by saying something clever.

And then you spent twenty minutes in there going over it.

You were trying to get to the bottom of a feeling that has no bottom in it.

That twenty minutes was the mistake. Not the I do not know. The part where you made it a problem to solve.

The tree is not asking you to be useless. It is asking you to notice that being on the side of the road is not the same as being behind.

All right. Here is the thing to try, and it is five minutes long.

On your next walk, any walk, and for the first five minutes, do not look at one single thing you have already looked at today.

That is it. That is the whole assignment.

Your own street will do it. Your own kitchen will do it.

Most people make it about half a block before they catch themselves. The same tree. The same crack in the pavement. The same neighbor’s bin out by the curb.

Do not fight it. When the old thing shows up, let it pass through and go back to looking.

One rule, and it is the rule that does the work. Do not name anything out loud while you are doing it.

Not even in your head.

Naming is what ends it. The moment you say sycamore, you have a box for it and it is in the box, and your eyes go back to the sidewalk.

The whole point is to be somewhere you do not have a word for yet.

Here is how you know it happened, because otherwise this is just a nice walk with extra steps.

When you get back to the door, say one thing out loud that you could not have named at the start of the walk.

One sentence. Out loud, to the room. The room can be a kitchen. It can be a truck cab with the window down.

If nothing comes, that is a real answer and you say that instead. Nothing came today. That happens about one walk in four.

If you want the long version, and this part is optional.

Pick one sense for the whole walk and go with it.

Boots only, so you hear the ground change under you and you stop looking down. Or nose only. Or eyes on the middle distance and never on your feet, so you stop watching for roots.

That one is harder than it sounds. You will want to look at your feet every four steps and your whole body will argue with you about it.

And if you skip all of it, which you may do, then you got twenty minutes of a man walking home in the dark.

One man and one heavy left leg. That’s its own kind of exercise.

Do not tell me how it went. I am not keeping score and I would not know what to do with the information.

Bo has found the truck before I have.

I did not look at the moon tonight. It’s not mine. Galileo had it.

I looked at a pipe somebody put in the ground a long time ago.