Mind Set Go

I first stepped foot on the AT over half of a century ago.  Even as a child it seemed unfathomable that one could walk all that way.  But I was closer to the middle, standing on the path next to the parking lot where a laden station wagon waited, ticking and cooling, when my parents pointed it out.  (The path, not the car.)  Quickly I wanted to know, “Can we go on it?”  The answer was no.  You see, there was no time.  

But even then, I seemed to sense an enormity of the country and all of those states between a beginning and an end, when time wasn’t a factor– at least not one I had to worry about.  I relied on others for that.  That hope, that mystery, that longing, it never really left even though my eight-year-old mind quickly forgot about it.  But it was there, dormant, all along.  And I realize now, that we are all governed by some untouched rule of what we can do and when it should happen, dependent, of course, on our acceptance of a perception of it.  We, after all, have places to go and be.  To-do lists to write and complete.  Don’t we?  And what if we don’t?  I mean, what then?

Seeing as there is presently a 90-year-old hiking the AT, attempting to become the oldest to complete a through-hike, maybe it is all relative?  My mind wanders to, “Am I as old as I think?”  My thinking suddenly seems programmed to count the days left.  Has my thinking, itself, become old, or is it, itself, affected by the judgements and perceptions I cast upon it, governed by something so far away from reality it is unfathomable?  

At 5 or 50, does one think the same as over 60?  Do those over 60 or beyond measure footpaths by the steps they think they have left as they wander, perhaps aimlessly, in some state of wonder with perceptions of the quality those steps, yet untaken, may behold?  Does it ultimately, for most of us, at least, come down to perceiving that there are pathways behind us with only one ahead left?

What exactly is the measurement of a footpath?  If you were but a big sloth-y slug, what story would be told of what you left behind?  A legacy for others to follow or a maze of circles seemingly with no beginning or end?  Don’t tell me know where you have been or where it might all end.  If you left your sluglike ways, could you, for one moment, cast your feet in one direction, measured by nobo or sobo, (northbound or southbound), for a period of time, when the only thing left to follow was the last step that you had taken?  

The draw isn’t the footsteps.  It’s not how deep the treads.  How rocky the road.  It’s not because it’s there or because you can.  There is something much deeper that draws you to the woods.  There is energy in the path, its inhabitants soaring the skies while others hide under rocks.  There are streams to be crossed and even people to meet along the way, and it speaks to you like no other words, and it never leaves, however dormant it may become, for an indeterminant period of time.  Call it instinctual; your karma; your fate.

Ultimately, we wonder about conceptions of what we are meant to do and become, stumbling in the darkness to wake up to the light.  The light that was always there leading us home.  Who do you take along the way?  Who will be there when you get there, wherever there is.  And just who was left behind?

Life’s little ramblings seem so important.  And the affects (and effects) we leave behind speak the truths of what we believe to be real.  Didn’t you exist before your first breath, when others already knew you were there, twisting and turning?  Were you writhing to get out or merely stretching before you knew how?  If life isn’t measured by breaths, the very breaths that keep us alive, how does one fathom… what… happens… after?

And so there are but a limited number of breaths you will take, starting, of course with that very first one, when air first filled your tiny little lungs.  Your eyes looked around and saw a new reality, your new reality, (or so you may have already thought,) one perhaps first measured by self.  While you one day had to drag yourself to literally get up, standing, you looked upon many paths and choices along the way.  Bringing you here to this written page, this spoken word, this crossroad between a path taken and one from which you might think you walk away.  As if, by chance, there is some choice.  But like a child told no, you escape from a new beginning by the resolve you have of your end.  A time that beckons closer when you think there is no time left.