I Walk to Be Free
A note from the author:
I originally wrote this in the fall semester of my sophomore year at college. I rediscovered it recently and published it here because I still like the idea.
As I write this, it’s a time of year when I’m most inclined to take long strolls with no particular destination in mind. I’m eased by the sight of leaves performing their annual color change and quietly thrilled by the sharp tang of someone somewhere burning them. It’s an enticing escape.
Zipped tight, my jacket pockets hold Twitter’s latest political commentaries at bay. The physical distance from my apartment temporarily numbs me to my unfinished novel, another science fiction thriller primed for the literary market’s current trends and a shelf at Barnes & Noble. I’m able to witness the lurid hues overhead for myself, not through a glowing screen, cropped, filtered, and reduced to an interpretation. I watch the fallen leaves scatter wherever the breeze happens to place them, not picked, flipped, and arranged a certain way for an influencer to capture the perfect photo.
In the greater world, I’m freed from the artificial one whose laws are determined by trends; its very function defined by the wants, needs, and desires of a finite population.
The scope is spectacular. In just a single teaspoon of soil beneath my shoe, tens of billions of microbes flourish invisible to the naked eye; and each leaf flittering on the wind is no less sophisticated than humanity’s most advanced technology, its “blueprints” more ancient than the forerunners to modern civilization. A simple walk outside exposes me to unfathomable amounts of complexity — yet to my eye it’s only a fraction of the planet, a morsel of its interconnected ecosystem, a corner on a sidewalk.
But with enough perspective, even planets seem small. Years ago, a probe momentarily turned to capture a snapshot of Earth from an unimaginable distance of 3.7 billion miles, offering an unparalleled glimpse of the scale at which things truly operate. Voyager 1’s image became aptly known as “Pale Blue Dot.”
The image can’t concern itself with the world it came from or the anthropocentric expectations governing it. There’s nothing to filter and make pleasing to human eyes, no relatable quotes concerning their everyday life relevant enough to attach. Mankind’s shared blue marble is reduced to a pixel near the edge and almost lost in grain, exposed for what it actually is: a feature, not the subject.
I walk to skirt the boundary between two planes, to remind myself that I’m truly part of a greater existence. Something mysterious, grander than my imagination can accept and whose limits are quite possibly beyond my capacity to ever fully understand. Reminding myself isn’t only humbling, I find it liberating.
That’s why whenever life’s mandates start to feel heavy, I close the computer, silence the phone, and step outside my little corner. So I may walk and be free.
Image Credit:
Voyager I. “Pale Blue Dot.” The Planetary Society, www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blue-dot.html.
