Sometimes you just go for a walk.

Sometimes you just go for a walk. That’s how life starts: you just go along from one thing to the next. Early on your growth is astonishing as you learn to walk and talk inside of the first three years, along with a host of other physical, mental, and emotional milestones. You’re so aware, so in the present.

As you age, you learn to string the ‘nows’ together so you have slightly longer term plans and ambitions. But things don’t always go the way you planned. Sometimes you backtrack; sometimes it’s a dead end and you have to go another way. Sometimes it feels like you’re not moving at all and sometimes you have to stop and take a rest.

Along the way, you start thinking “where am I going anyway?” You try to climb up high to get a better look around you. You might get a better sense of place when you do this. Or maybe you just keep your head down and keep plodding along, content that you’re where you should be and going the right direction. Some people think they’ve got a map, or a GPS or sat-nav that tells them the way. But these human devices can be notoriously unreliable. Many of us get so wrapped up in the mire of past patterns and the fog of the future that we lose all sense of direction: our awareness of now all but disappears.

It’s like you’re just walking in a hayfield, wandering this way and that, and it all seems like a maze: you can’t see where you’re going and only have a hazy picture of where you’ve been. Then, at the end of it, you get a helicopter ride back home and you look down and see this fantastic, otherworldly pattern to the whole path. The whole time you were walking, you were creating an amazing picture in the field. Everywhere you trod forms a piece of the puzzle.

When I look back, that’s how it feels: I occasionally have a glimpse of something shimmering through the haze, a sense that I am right where I should be, that the path is bewildering and the pattern intricate, but that it is actually being formed according to a universal intention.