GOING WALKIES
"In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. ... But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day."
- Thoreau's Journal, January 7, 1857
I haven't been much good for anything of late, as the world at large sees its greater good. I've been little good, for a few things, as I see it. Going walkies, mostly.
There are big changes coming at my workplace, and I'm not at all sure my boss has saved a place for me in his vision of the expansion of our dept. My boss is not a mean man, and he's not incompetent. He's done a lot of good since he arrived. He has set a new, tougher standard to match our increased volume. I think he thinks he's giving me a fair chance to prove myself. I also think he thinks I'm not up to it. My job is not only to do my job to the new standard, but also to convince him that I am doing it. Basically, I am on trial for my job every day, and I must advocate as well as perform my best to overcome the meme of failure my boss has attached to my person. I'm the only person left in the dept. that worked there before he arrived. It may be that he wants a team of his own picked workers, and I'm the leftover in the back of the fridge, well past my toss date. In that case, I can only fight a holding action until I can find another job. But I'll be damned if I get fired for not doing my job. If I am out of work even for a short time my family will be in serious trouble financially. I don't normally talk about this sort of thing on the Tent Show, because my job is not very interesting, and this blog is not a diary, though it is occasionally personal, certainly idiosyncratic, and occasionally confessional on selected subjects. I do not let it all hang out. But, pilgrims and seekers, I want you all to know that I've haven't given up on blogging, it's not that I don't love you anymore, it's just that I've had other things on my mind—other things I'd just as soon not have on my mind, thank you. Lintomancy in the depths of my navel is not what is called for in this case. Seems to me that the wind has gone out of almost all our sails, and we lie becalmed in some collective Sargasso of the blogosphere. Instead of blogging Annie Beagle and I go walkies, and I wait for my brain to fill in the blank. One more thing. I miss you all terribly.
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre"—to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a sainte-terrer", a saunterer—a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels."
- Thoreau, Walking
11:20:22 PM 
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