19 April 2009

grateful

I am slowly re-hydrating and recovering from five hours of hiking. It was sunny. And therefore it was hot. For a while hot was nice, as it is at the end of a seemingly interminable winter, and then it became just hot. But the wildflowers are blooming, right now, and the trees were covered in lichen, and in the piney woods, the air smelled like sun-warmed pine needles.

Really, though, even when it got almost too hot, the hot was still nice. It was nice to walk in the sun and nice to sit in the shade.

I am noticing an interesting phenomenon as I approach thirty, and I can't quite decide whether to blame it on growing older/up or on Gone West or on the five notebooks of thinking I have filled since I moved here. The phenomenon is this: I am finally able to enjoy the things I am doing while I am doing them, instead of living in my head, instead of thinking of everything that could be different to make perfect the thing I am doing. I am finally able to go for a hike and not wish that I was on a different continent or with a different person or doing something different. I am learning, as they say, to be fully present in the moment. I am not sure how I am learning this, but I am grateful.

...

While writing that, my computer went all blue screen of death on me, and when it restarted, I got a message offering me five things I could try to prevent the blue screen of death. I think I shall opt, however, for the sixth option: try not to catch your foot in the computer cord and knock the laptop off the table flat onto the ground. (I mean the flat literally, by the way. It fell open completely flat like a rectangular computer pancake.) That should fix it.

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