You ain't goin' nowhere

    

"Ordinarily, when you step on a path, you're going somewhere. You start on it, traverse it, and, if all goes as planned, you arrive at your goal or destination.
    The path to freeing the mind is not like this. This path neither begins nor ends. Thus it's not really a path to somewhere.
    Furthermore, the moment you set your foot on it, you've already traversed its entirety. Just to be on the path is to complete it. I mean this literally, not symbolically or metaphorically."

Steven Hagen, Buddhism Plain & Simple
    
    

    

Every morning I walk to the F train, up Sixth Avenue, the same way, day after day: 3 blocks north, always on the west side of the street, then crossing at the northwest corner of 14th Street to the northeast corner of 14th and 6th, and down into the station where the same people line up at the same hash marks on the platform, just as I do. I might as well still be sleeping.

Sometimes, though, and at the last possible moment, I impetuously zigzag across Sixth Avenue at 12th or 13th and, feeling inordinately pleased with myself for having an adventure, stride east to the R station at the northwest corner of Union Square Park.

I love Union Square Park, especially early in the morning when the statue of barefoot Gandhi is garlanded in flowers, and the occasional ragtag band of demonstrators is assembling on the lip of the stairway. Ah, anarchy. It refreshes me, makes me feel less like a cog in the wheel.

A few days ago, feeling in need of a jolt, I swung across 6th and walked to Union Square. It was a beautiful morning, sunny with just a hint of fall. I came up University Place and crossed 14th, checking the time, and then I saw her, a bag lady pushing her cart, wearing ankle high Prada boots.

Wow, I thought.

And then, before I could catch myself, I wondered if they were knockoffs.

Time travel

Is the shortest distance between two points a straight line, or a madeleine?

Deliberately she visualized the living room of their Flynders farmhouse, then, blurring that bright familiar place, another room began to form: the skimpy parlor of her childhood, her father and a friend speaking late into the evening while she lay drowsily on the Victorian sofa, listening to the drone of the men’s low voices, feeling on her neck the sting of a horsehair which had worked its way up through the black upholstery, safe and dreaming of the brilliance of her own true grown up life to come.

She put her hand on her cheek and touched the place where the horsehair had pricked, and she gasped at the force of a memory that could, in the space of a breath taken and released, expunge the distance between sleepy child and exhausted adult, as though she thought, it had taken all these years to climb the stairs to bed.

—Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
— Martin Buber