A note from the circle.
I walk the same loop every morning. Same three streets, same corner, same coffee place, same left turn at the mailbox with the faded paint. I've done this walk for five years now. My dog is nine. She has done it slightly longer than I have, though she doesn't remember the earlier ones as clearly as I do.
At the beginning I did the walk because it was a way to get her out of the house. Then I did it because it was good for me. Then I did it because it was what she and I did together. Now I do it because I do it. If you had asked me five years ago whether I was going to walk the same three streets every morning for the rest of my life I would have found the idea depressing. Now I find it something like sacred, though I hesitate to use that word because it sounds too big for what this is.
Here is what five years of the same walk has taught me.
The first thing is that there is no such thing as the same walk. This is the observation everyone reports and it turns out to be true. The light is different every morning. The temperature is different every morning. The people on the sidewalk are different every morning. The tree at the corner of the third street had leaves for the first two years and then it didn't for a summer because someone across the street took it out, and now there's a different tree that's still short. My dog goes slower now than she used to. The coffee place changed hands twice.
You can call this presence, or you can call it noticing, or you can call it what our grandparents used to call not being distracted. It doesn't matter what you call it. It happens on its own if you walk the same route long enough. You start to see the things that are actually there instead of the general idea of what should be there.
The second thing is that repetition is not the enemy of interest. This one took me longer to arrive at. I had a lot of years of trying to make life interesting by doing new things, going new places, meeting new people. I don't regret any of it. But there was a way in which the newness became its own habit. I was addicted to being somewhere I hadn't been before, and that addiction was as automatic as any other addiction. It didn't leave much room for the depth that comes from returning.
Depth comes from returning. This is a thing you have to feel to know, and I only started feeling it around year three, when I noticed that I could tell time of year by the smell of one particular hedge. That kind of knowledge doesn't come from doing a lot of different things. It comes from doing one thing enough times that it starts to reveal itself to you.
The third thing is about my dog, and I don't quite know how to say this without sounding sentimental. She has been the constant of these five years. Roommates have moved out. Jobs have changed. Relationships have ended and begun and ended. I have moved apartments once. Through all of it, at 6:45 in the morning, she has been ready by the door with the same expression on her face. The expression says, essentially, are we walking or aren't we.
We are walking. We have always been walking. She has walked with me through the year I broke up with someone who mattered to me, and through the year my mother got sick, and through the year I started the small business I always said I would start and then made no money on it, and through the year I made a little money and it wasn't enough. She has no idea what any of these years were about. She just knows we walked.
There is something about having a witness to your life who doesn't need explanations. She doesn't need to know why I'm sad. She doesn't need to know why I'm distracted. She doesn't need to be caught up on what happened at work. She only needs to know that we're on the walk, and that I'm here, and that eventually we will turn left at the mailbox.
I don't think I would have made it through the harder years without that constancy. I know that sounds like a large claim to make about a walk with a dog. I'm going to let it stand anyway.
If you have not walked the same three streets every morning for five years, I understand the resistance. It sounds boring on paper. It sounds like giving up. It's not. It's the opposite of that. It's the practice of showing up for a life that is already there, and being paid back, slowly, in ways that a more exciting life would have never allowed.
Tomorrow morning we will walk again. It will be the same walk. It will be a different walk.