…Fortune..
Pictures and short videos of today’s exercise…
ahh.
giggling walking backward.
La Luna
Columbus Day
The destination of the backward walk
Today, I had a few micro-adventure plans to shake myself up a bit. I decided to walk backward from my house to the library. At the library, I wanted to do a business card synchronicity experiment. I’ll save that for tomorrow’s blog. Today, something different happened.
As I left the house, Sheila handed me the mp3 player, and I noticed a stylized-patterned response about to emerge from my mouth. The moment I caught the fake self about to speak, it killed itself. The thought went something like this, “I don’t listen to headphones when I walk. I listen to my surroundings instead.” All of this with an air of superiority over those idiotic heaphone-walkers. So I caught the fake self, it killed itself, and I listened to Ratatat
It felt great to feel the landscape dancing with the music in my brain. Their dance made both feel more alive. A mother and her child came scootering and running toward me on the sidewalk. I could see the little boy talking to me, so I took off a headphone. “What’s your name?” “My name is Garrett. What’s your name?” “Ethan. Me and my mommy are going on a walk.” “Have fun Ethan!” They passed me and ran off toward the middle school. I wondered if poor little Ethan knew that the building he scootered past would serve as his prison in a few short years…
I walked the rest of the way seeing no other humans except the ones in cars.
When I got to the library, I encountered an empty parking lot. A picture of Columbus (see picture below) sat in the window on a sign that read, “Library Closed Oct. 13 for Columbus Day.” Today would ot allow the incursion of the exercise I had planned.
Instead, I felt forced to celebrate Columbus day. In a way, I had imitated Columbus today. I pioneered the first backward walk from my house to the library. I did so on land that used to embrace the Luiseno, Cahuilla, Cupeno, Kumeyaay, and Northern Diegueño people before the first Spanish contact in 1542.
I walked to ye olde coffee shop to write this blog. The backward walk went well, and when I walked forward again, it felt new and different. Not only did I get to have a new experience, that of walking backward to the library, but I also got to experience something I had taken for granted in a new way, walking forward again. All of that while listening to epic and sweeping sound layers from the mp3 player….All under a bright and full moon over the orange Southern California glow.
There will be pictures and videos inserted into this entry as soon as I get home to upload them.
Do something out of the ordinary today. Become out of the ordinary to yourself. Be weird and kind to yourself.
Love, wildness, chaos, and joy….
GTD
“Great Scott!” as the Doc would say.