Students’ Views

I was getting tired of living in my head. So I went outside.

While I’m at it, I thought, let’s get some exercise done. Actually, the exercise was not superfluous. It was essential. Every time I jog when I stop I can feel the blood rush to my head. It’s almost like it fills my head and anything else in there gets pushed out. It feels like, for a moment, I have no thoughts.

We live in a world of screens and symbols. Between tvs, computer screens, and windshields, we have nourished a fundamental abstraction from our  perception of the world. Have you ever known someone for a long time, and then suddenly one day looked at them and it seemed to you that you were looking at their face for the first time. Sometimes you’ll be lost in thought, and when you finally ‘come out’ of it, and the world around you will seem utterly real and there for just a moment, and then you’ll slip back into your mental chatter, and a screen comes down over everything.

There is a park near to school, called San Gabriel, and in it a bike path that goes around town begins. I jogged there the other day, and since I had never jogged or walked it, it was all novel, it was kind of fresh and new. That combined with the exercise made me feel, at moments, like I was almost actually experiencing it. For the most part I was fighting in my head, trying to stop thinking so much, trying to make the words stop forming, and just take it in. But it’s not easy. I mean, silence isn’t something we as Americans are used to. We don’t even realize how hard it is to quiet our own inner chatter because we rarely are left alone with it.

But this path was amazing. It goes under highways and bridges, traverses at one point a residential area. You think you’re in a forest, though. There are creeks, either fed by or feeding the San Gabriel River, which follow the path for a long time. The autumn colors are in their height. There is underbrush along the path and  leaves carpeting the floor among the trees. Every ten minutes or so you encounter deer, alone or in groups.

At one point I was walking back, after 3 1/2 miles, and I glanced to my left off the side of the path where the terrain quickly rose into an embankment. One the top of this little mound following the path was a baby deer among the bushes. It was still and austere, simple. It didn’t move, it didn’t look cautious or agitated. It was simply taking me in.

This experience did more than any Wednesday night study breaks at the frat houses ever could (not that I’ve attended the frat houses during the weekdays). At some point I felt at peace, like I was living life the way it was supposed to be, without concern. Not thinking about things that aren’t there, including the future. Not about school, or about relationships, I didn’t think of a movie that the path reminded me of, or have a song stuck in my head. I wasn’t removed from that which was around me, it was as if a sense of touch had seeped into my sight, I had an intimate relationship with everything that I saw. Things were things in themselves, singular- that bush, that leaf. Things weren’t grouped together into overarching ideas that killed the here and now, like ‘forest’ or ‘ground’.

I want to go more often, but soon I’ll be familiar with the path, I’ll know the bends and the notable landmarks (the huge log here, boulder there). Soon familiarity will descend upon everything that I see like a blanket, a screen that I can’t escape. And in the face of this screen my thoughts will project outwards, and my sense of being in the world will fade. I will be trapped inside again.