Monday, January 2, 2012

Walk

Well to start off I wasn’t really super excited about going on a walk. I wanted to go somewhere exciting and interesting to walk to but I didn’t have to time to drive anywhere. So I just left from my house.

At first I couldn’t concentrate on anything, my mind just wandered and I did a horrible job of “reflecting” on anything. I did take a lot of pictures of somewhat obscure things but I didn’t really have a plan on how to use them. I just found my pictures interesting and I figured I could make up something about it later. After a while I just came to the conclusion that I would not experience any type of “awakening” or intense moment of realization. I even came up with some basic structure as to how I would write this assignment. I would just describe my walk at the end I would say something about how the walk didn’t really change me or anything but that’s okay because I’m happy with who I am right now.

But obviously, that’s not how I wrote this assignment. Just a little while after I had already planned out my entire writing assignment I got to the top of a hill near a school. Around the backside of the school there’s a hill that used to have some type of trail on it but now is little more than rocks, dirt, and fallen trees. On the other side of this hill, at the bottom, there is a trail and often times I will ride my bike along this trail. It used to be that I would carry my bike down the hill, over the fallen trees and stuff, but last year for my birthday I got a pair of clipless shoes with cleats at the bottom so I can’t really climb down the hill anymore. So for my walk I decided to walk down the hill, mainly just because I hadn’t been down it in a while, I couldn’t think of another place to go, and maybe (if you want to get super reflective) I missed it.

As I was walking down, I saw a little part of the former trail branch of a ways to a place I had never noticed before. At first, I had no idea what I was looking at. I saw an old tank of some sort and what looked like tile and concrete. I also noticed a little shed back a ways and quite a bit of graffiti all over the place. It took a while, but I eventually decided that it had to have been an old house. The tiles I saw were actually on top of a couple square yards of linoleum and I figured out that it must have been a shower in a bathroom (really where else would you find linoleum and tile). And the concrete I saw, I’m pretty sure that was the foundation of the house. I think the shed was just a shed, but it did have electrical outlets and stuff so I would bet that it was built along with the house. I still didn’t know what the tank was, but after a while I decided that it had to be either a septic tank or a tank for heating oil.

Then I headed back. It was pretty much pouring down rain now but I was content. That old house (or what used to be a house) make my walk interesting and worthwhile. For a long time though, I couldn’t think of a way to connect this to anything deep or basically say anything besides “Yeah, ummm I saw a demolished house and... Yeah, it was pretty cool”. Now that I think about it though, maybe the significant part wasn’t that I found an old, demolished house but that I actually took the path to the house just to see what I could find.

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