The Power of Walking – Part Three

Continued from May 5 post –

The Power of Walking

This post marks a transition to a broader theme that will become Part Two of my autobiography.

          The full importance and meaning of my neighbor’s recovery from stroke by walking didn’t come to my mind at that time. But, the image of his effort, his determination and faith, and the unimaginable renewal of his ability to function impressed me then and remained vivid with me through the years. His accomplishment became significant for me in 2006, when I placed the idea of the healing power of walking into the growing structure of my personal philosophy. The year 2006 truly was, for me, a time of endings and beginnings, of Omega and Alpha times.

          A description of events during a few preceding years will show the thought tracers leading to a second, or possibly third, beginning. In the year 2000, I had developed the concept of Temporal Grace, which proposed the possibility of my exercising enough power to construct the circumstances of my future (see April 30 post). I began college in the fall of 2000, which was a resumption of schooling I dropped out of when younger, and obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Literature in 2003. This action was an application of the principle of Temporal Grace. My senior thesis was a seventy-page autobiography, which, although brief, enabled any reader to essentially know who I was. Of course, the autobiography also enabled the autobiographer to better know what sort of person he was. As a consequence, when I turned fifty-seven it seemed to me that I had completed a wide, circuitous, life-cycle, and my life could have ended then with a sense of accomplishment. But I didn’t die, and I wondered how the next life-cycle would begin. I even questioned how much I should try to influence events and create circumstances, because I didn’t have complete faith in Temporal Grace. I had concluded my autobiography with these words:   

“As a young boy, I was not conscious of any happiness, although I may have been happy. It is only as a self-conscious man that I can reflect and assign meaning to my memories. By this practice, I am reorienting myself within my own history and turning toward a new day. I learned an important lesson that morning on Plum Island – one must arrive to study the scene several minutes before the dawn in order to receive the complete impression of the sun’s rising. In a similar way, my search for a purpose today must begin by remembering what happened yesterday.”

I wrote, “…I may have been happy.” But my reflections declare to me that I was happy when a young boy. And I was happy unintentionally and without strategy. No long range planning was required. There was no need to profess a purpose in life or to be “goal oriented” in order to be happy. So, in 2003 I asked myself whether or not I could be a happy adult by not planning and strategizing. But my definitive answer to that question wouldn’t come to me for a few more years. I was again sitting on my Wall of Contemplation, just as I had been when eighteen years old. That was the time of my second beginning! My first beginning was at conception, unless it is true, as I have surmised, that a kind of metaphysical beginning occurred before my conception and will occur again when I die. But more of this in another place.

          – to be continued