The walk that is the same walk

The light is up off the creek and everything is one colour. Six in the morning, give or take, and the fog has not decided to leave.

This is the fourth week of the same mile. About forty minutes. Out past the creek, up along the second fence, and back down through the sycamores.

Here is what happened on it.

I had a plan. The plan is mine. The plan didn’t work.

Week three, I decided I would fix the boredom by standing still. There’s a split oak a third of the way round, and I’d stop at the oak and wait to see what came.

It worked, for about two walks. Standing at the oak was the best part of the mile.

And then it was not. I’d get to the oak, and nothing would come, and I’d be annoyed at an oak.

Bo sat under it the whole time. Three weeks running, that’s where he decided this walk stops.

So last week I stood over a dog for eleven minutes, waiting for something to come. Nothing came. The one living thing there was horizontal.

Here is what the plan actually did. It ate the mile.

And I found out something else, and I didn’t like it. I was walking faster. Not running. Hurrying, down the back half of that loop, with a purpose, toward the end of it.

So I gave myself a stop, and the walk got faster, and I could not tell whether I was bored or I was finished.

So here is the question for today.

Why does a walk I know go stale, and what’s actually going stale?

I want to be straight with you about that one. I don’t have it. I’ve had it in my mouth for a week, and it keeps changing shape.

It is not a deep question. It is the size of a mailbox.

So I went and got out what I’ve read.

Here is where I’m borrowing from. I’m standing outside that whole old tradition, taking one thing out of it, which is the polite way of saying I’m borrowing.

The name is Basho. Japanese, sixteen forty four to sixteen ninety four.

He wrote very short poems, and most of what he was arguing against was a poem working too hard.

He liked the ordinary word. The word you would use for a cup.

Now, he thought the ordinary word wasn’t the lesser one. He thought a very plain thing, said in a plain word, would still land.

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

A plain word is not a lazy word. It is a word nobody dressed up for anybody.

Now the cost of that, and it is mine and not his. If a plain word is enough, then every long word I reach for is a way of not looking at the pond.

That’s a hard rule to live under. I like a long word, and I like a sentence that takes its time getting where it is going.

I am not throwing that out. I know what it is for now, which is the best I can say.

Then there is the thing about him I didn’t expect to find. There’s a three line poem that everybody knows. A pond, a frog that jumps into it, and the noise the water makes afterwards.

I’m not going to read it to you. You have it, everybody has it.

And a description of a poem that short is the poem with the edges taken off.

So I’m going to say what’s in it, and nothing else. Three lines. A pond. A frog jumps. One noise.

Here’s the part I want on the record. He wrote that one himself. He wrote a great many of them, and he walked a very long way to write some of them.

But what he told the young men around him about how to write, the advice, the arguing, that mostly reached us because they wrote it down. After he was gone.

So the poems are his, and the teaching is his as they heard it.

And here’s why that mattered to me, standing at an oak. The record we have of what he told them is other people writing things down after him.

Nobody is writing down that I stood at an oak for eleven minutes.

That is my walk too. It does not get kept by being good. It gets kept by somebody doing it again.

Now, the other half of that poem, and this is the part I take. Nothing in it is doing anything. No moon. No broken heart. Nobody using a season as a feeling.

The man is not even in it. He’s the one who happened to be standing there when the water made a noise.

That’s attention without a show. Nobody was performing for anybody.

Back to the fourth week. So the mile didn’t change. It is the same fence, it is the same split oak, and it will be the same mile next week.

So what went stale? Me, hurrying through it, and the standing still I did to make up for the hurrying.

Here is what I think boredom is, and I only got it this week. Boredom is not the opposite of paying attention. Boredom is attention before it gets good.

It is your eyes arriving at a place they have already been and having nothing to do there yet.

It is not a punishment. It is the first four weeks.

I’ve been treating my own attention like something that either works or doesn’t work, and that’s not how it goes. It gets good, and it gets good by being let back in.

So this week I didn’t stop at the oak. I kept walking past it, and the mile came back up to me in pieces, the way a thing does when you’re not asking it for anything.

The creek makes two noises on that loop and I had only ever heard one. Where it runs over the gravel bar it is one sound, and where it goes under the sycamore roots it is another one, and it is louder.

I’ve walked that creek four weeks and I heard both of them this week, because for once I was moving.

Now, somewhere out there, you’ve a walk you know. The one to the mailbox. The one around the block.

And you’ve a speed for it. One speed, the one you always do it at.

So what’s the speed I want? Not faster. The pace you walk at when you have not decided to be anywhere yet.

So here’s the thing to try, and it takes one walk out of a door, twice over.

Go out on a short walk you already know. Then come back the way you came.

On the way out, don’t look for anything. Just walk it.

On the way back, out loud, name the things that are different. Not the things you would notice for a person, the smaller ones. A leaf that is down that was not down. Water that has moved. Mud where there was none. A bird in a tree that was not in the tree.

Say them out loud where the trees are, if you would rather no person heard you.

Then say one thing that did not change.

That’s the whole assignment. One walk, twice, and about six things out loud.

If you can’t find six, that’s not a failure. It means you already know them.

It works on the way to the mailbox and back, which is the point of it. You have the route already, and it is long enough to get bored on.

If you skip it, you’ve got ten minutes of a man admitting he was bored in public, which is its own kind of walk.

Same mile tomorrow. Bo will be fine. I’m the problem.