Walkabout

I understand that this term comes from the description of an Australian aboriginale custom.

Native Americans had similar rites. It was not unusual for indegenous Americans to go on vision quests, long solitary spells in nature. Time out in the natural world forces a sort of introspection that many traditions call divine.

Enough traditions focus on the importance of solitary exploration that walkabouts can be seen as a fundamental form human communion with God. 

I’m reading this great book at present called the Tao of Wu, in which RZA provides readers with some of the lessons he’s learned in life. It’s caused me to return to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching as well. RZA really has a knack for cataloging life experience as these core and universal pilgrimages. 

He encourages anyone wishing to gain self-knowledge to fast for a day in solitude. If you do, you will have the assurance of communing with the divine inside of you. 

I love approaches like that. 

I mean, I did a solo cross country trip over the course of 6 weeks. I’ve also camped by myself off the Olympic Coast. I’ve made the attempt to listen to myself and learn why that voice inside my head tells me what it does. 

Those extended solitary experiments are on pause for me. 

My request for “solo time” has sort of become a running joke. I am so enmeshed in life’s responsibilities that a good day finds me a single hour of true solitude. And that hour finds me so exhausted that the best I can do is read a book or maybe try and write something. 

But this blog—contrary, I know, to the present paragraph—is about exalting the ways that simple, ordinary living is immensely worthwhile and freeing. 

I’d like to tell you about my new morning routine: walkabouts with a toddler. 

If you’ve seen babies grow up, you’ll relate to the stage of life my younger daughter is in.

In brief, she discovered that she is a known and powerful entity upon this earth. Discovery of this, what Nietzche called the “will to power,” is electrifying. 

But before this becomes a rewarding stage in a toddler’s life, there is a small mountain to climb. They discover their power without the skill to communicate their will. Can you imagine? It’d be like obtaining the force but not having a lightsaber at your disposal. How frustrating! 

The nugget, as we call her, climbed that mountain, the one representing the difference between her understanding of things and her ability to make herself understood. It was rough. But now that she has broken the communication threshold, it’s a brave new world out there. 

In the mornings, often before the coffee finishes percolating, she is on the tips of her toes reaching for that front door handle. From her perspective, it’s the great unknown: sights, sounds and smells she’s never encountered.

“Nugget, you need your shoes on,” is my usual response to her first opening the door.

“Oosh?” 

“Yes. Where are your shoes?”

“Dah,” she says. (“Dah” is a general term for “yes” or “ok” or “got it.” It is usually accompanied with a head nod.) Then she toddles over to the shoe bin.

“Ep?” She asks for help.

“You got it,” I say. 

And then we sally forth, out of the door before anyone else in the house is awake. 

Our walkabouts mainly involve her walking about, to be honest. I follow and play the role of lifeguard. And while I have a pretty grave responsibility to uphold, these moments are filled with absolute wonder and self-reflection.

My career has conditioned me for this sort of reflection. 

The principal where I teach has said that teachers need to start where their students are in order to lead them someplace new. I heard him say this in my first year teaching. And since, I have heard it several other times, and I’ve observed him practice the strategy, as well. It’s pretty crucial, if you think about it. How could you possibly make a dent in someone’s life if you make no attempt to gauge the shape of the thing you’re working on?

This practice has led me to constantly reset any presumptions I might be carrying.

This idea also helped me as a football coach. One of my school’s all time great coaches used to say that it’s not about what the coaches know, it’s about what the players know. As a coach, this notion helped me put my attention on what I could teach the players, instead of trying to impress others with my knowledge. 

This notion is true across the board, if you think about it. What is the point of having an argument with someone if you aren’t genuinely open to understanding how he sees the world? Without this basic tenet, arguments are a time for you to say the things you already believe in to an audience that will never hear you. 

Life is far more interesting when you think about others.

So, I pay attention as my daughter toddles.

Everything is a marvel. 

We don’t walk very far. It’s about the journey, as they say.

On our block alone, there are new flowers blooming everyday, new bird nests forming, new squirrels foraging. She walks up the steps to a church, pats on the door. Is she testing its durability? Maybe she’s knocking to see if anyone answers. Whatever the reason, she turns to me and says, “Dah,” as if her purpose here is served, before reverse-bear-crawling back down the steps. 

“Ish?”

“You want to go see the fish?”

“Dah,” she says. 

And she’s off. 

Her comprehension of boundaries is prescient. She knows she can’t cross the street without holding my hand. So she toddles, at a dangerous pace, toward the bumps where the sidewalk meets the road. Staring ahead, she throws up her hands and waits for me to grasp one. We’re off across the street to where an herb shop maintains a small fish pond in its drive. 

“Ep?” She asks for help rolling up her sleeve. 

And then, belly on the rim of the raised pond, she lets her hand rest in the cold water as the fish dart from her at first, and then, by small degrees, approach her again in hopes of finding food.

This lasts for a long time. 

We’ve sat there for an hour before, watching the fish dart and move through pockets of shadow. 

What’s in it for me?

That’s the question, isn’t it. 

And I guess, to be quite literal, nothing. There really is no point to my observations. There’s a tremendous amount of purpose to hers, though. I’ve seen those flowers before, that church door, those fish. I know what it feels like for coy to nibble on your finger thinking it’s food. The revelation is not the thing. 

I guess I’m just arguing that revelation never is the thing. 

It’s always when you approach the thing in a way you’ve never experienced before. I’d argue this is very much the goal of meditation. It is a reset button. These objects and experiences in your known world remain wild and unexplored for some. So why do we approach them with anything but the utmost reverence and regard?

Things become boring to us, absolutely. But those things don’t become boring because they change in nature. It’s our lack of imagination that imposes boredom upon them. 

If you doubt this, just observe a child in the park one day. Watch how awe-struck they become while feeling the grass or climbing a tree. 

These are examples for us, the adults, to note and acknowledge, not so that we can regret the days when all the world was green, but so we can appreciate how green the world still is, if not to us, then to someone.