Opinion: Smoothing life’s bumpy road

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Published: 06-18-2024 6:00 AM |
Dave Emerson of Old Ways Traditions lives in Canterbury.
It’s no news that the road can get more bumpy as we get older. Life’s often a pretty bumpy road anyway these days. Ignoring the bumps has become more challenging.
The beauty of the natural world around us can provide a distraction, less so for me at eighty-one now that I have to pay increasingly more attention to my walking or driving.
Recently Anne and I have created two easier trail sections for our use — more level, fewer rocks, one more conducive to sitting down and contemplating an active beaver pond.
Of course, we have less control over the bumps that continue to surprise us, coming along unexpectedly in our daily lives. Is it that there are fewer smooth sections or that we just notice the rough stretches more? I definitely have to make more of an effort to keep my mind in the more pleasant places.
It helps that I believe the spirit world is all-encompassing. I think it is the total world and that we’re all part of it and it is us. “Heaven” is where our minds can be if we make it a habit to practice going there.
We used to go to the mountains. No longer possible. But we went enough so the mountains are now part of us. Patterns made by wind blown grass in hard drifted snow. The silence of a mountaintop when you’re the only one up there. The song of a stream singing beside the trail.
When I was writing trail walk pieces people sometimes told me, “I love reading your trail tales, but I’ll never hike them.” I’d reply, “Well, a mental walk can be as good as a physical one.”
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Happy trails.