6683

Some people believe that troubles are blessings in disguise. I’m trying very hard to believe that. I don’t think I have the capability to see mine as blessings, but I at least I see them as fun.

This morning, I had a lift halfway to campus, where I was supposed to attend a meeting. Right after I stepped out of the car, I realized that I left my wallet at his house and not the smallest change is in my pocket. I had no option but to walk the whole 15-minute-driving distance. Maybe because my 2-hour sleep went well (or 2-hour sleep means my brains hadn’t functioned fairly to judge), when I started walking, there wasn’t any slight of grump crossed my mind. There was, though, a significantly meaningful laughing-at-myself episode occurred in silent.

I started asking how far exactly this 15-minute driving was. As I have no tools to measure, I thought of my walking steps. So, counting I started. I counted outloud one-to-ten repeatedly. I marked every ten with my right hand, and every hundred with my left hand. At the first 300 I was counting with full attention, evaluating how effective the method was, I think I didn’t walk straight.

Leaving 300s, the counting went automatically. Thinking about other things and counting at the same time started to feel easy. Accidentally, I started evaluating the counting behavior itself —the philosophy, the meaning, the essence. It wasn’t a hard assessment and intrepetation came out in seconds: it was totally stupid. As feeling stupid is always hazardous to my pride, I started thinking of something else. Sometimes I glared at my shoes and felt guilty of how it started to look dusty. I started wondering if I would accept it, if one of the passing cars stopped and offered me a lift. Thoughts, nothing fabulous I tell you, criss-crossed my head faster than my counting —which by the way were around 1500s.

There was nothing wrong with my muscles. I walked with steady pace, steady breath. Next to muscle check was brain check. There was no self-blaming nor self-teasing for leaving the wallet. Firstly, I think the counting saved me. Secondly, many toughts regarding the counting behavior kept me more occupied more than I anticipated. Overall, I feel funny about the whole thing —obviously about the counting part. So in my head, there was: the counting, the thoughts, and the laugh. It was 8.30 and my brain was already that peculiarly overclocked. I could think of nothing that would make the whole thing gone more wrong.

That was 3970s. Suddenly a huge blue object blocked my way: a pedestrian crossing bridge! That was 36-climbing steps of pain. It felt as if every leg mucle contracted in such a way I only experienced when climbing a mountain. Even my arms and neck felt tighter. On that bridge something cold and wet dripping down my eyes all the way down the cheek. I wasn’t sure if it was tears or sweats. I tried to hush away the possibilty of such experience having the capacity to interfere with my emotional stabilty. But emotional stabilty was rocked when I in front of me was 36-step down —36 steps of equal pain as the climbing ones. Right then I realized whether you are going up or down, you are defying gravity and it costs you energy, which at the moment was something I would dearly save.

Down the bridge was about one-third distance away from final check-point. The image of campus loby quickly took over the pain. It was approximately 2000 steps, but the bridge pain was entirely gone already. As long as the image stayed clear, I would be in a happy state. However, SOMETHING up there is toying with me. Not far away, around 4100s, a motor bike was slowing down asking me a direction —a totally unnecessary additional event. Counting went fuzzy, lobby went hazy, happiness went blurry. After giving him direction, I stood in silence recollecting the last number on my lips and two hands. I counted on.

At that 4000-ish steps, I started seeing clearly where this walk would end. Wherever, it is somewhere I knew and anticipated, even planned. You knew that all you have to do is walk the rest of the path. Problems along the rest of the way was somehow trivia because every step means you were closer to the lobby —where you have to walk no more, where something more interesting awaits. At those 4000-ish step I felt funnily like living, like being 40-ish —around how old I want to be as I always tell people: 42 to be exact. I guess that is why people say life begins at 40: because they begin to see what the journey is worth.

The last 2000 steps felt faster, a lot faster than the first 2000 (compared especially to the 3970th).
It was over an hour of a grand total 6683 steps[1] to campus lobby.
It was 9.30 in the morning, the day was 14.5 hours left.
I sweat, but wasn’t even tired.

PS:
I was half hour late to the meeting (not that it was important)
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[1] Does that mean I'll die age 67?