A Walk in the Woods: Hike 3 in the style of Bill Bryson

(from the series Hiking Atlanta's Hidden Forests in a Year)

On Tuesday, I woke up melancholy. Only the idle rich and the academic can afford to be really and truly melancholic. Other people have to suck it up and go to work. But writing can be postponed, and grading can be abandoned.

I made a few half-hearted attempts to get over myself and work. John Winthrop would have been ashamed of my work ethic (and my lack of Puritanism). I would never have made it though the winter in the Ciy on the Hill, and I couldn't make it through a stack of summaries either. I gave in and went hiking.

Not the John Winthrop, hike into the wilderness in search of food and Indians to oppress kind of hike, but the kind of leisurely hiking favored by the idle rich and the melancholic academic.

Because my ennui made me too lazy to drive very far, I chose Vickery Creek, a familiar system of trails in the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, though it doesn't actually include the Chattahoochee River, but a tributary, Vickery Creek or Big Creek. I had walked the trails near the Roswell Mill, but this section, which I entered from Riverside Rd, was new to me.

I walked about 5 miles and saw many exciting sights, including a very comely bridge, an Easter Island head (which turned out to be a log), a bear (which turned out to be a log), and a turtle (which was real and alive and not a log. I texted Aaron and Livy to let them know everything I saw, including the things that turned out to be logs.

The turtle let me get very close and photograph him (phone screen broken, so no photos in this post), and he didn't even pull his head into his shell. He just looked at me, not the least concerned. It was like he knew that I was no John Winthrop, and I was much to lazy and filled with melancholy to bother turning him into soup. Eventually, he broke our eye contact and wandered away.

On my hike, I listened to a Planet Money podcast, which was not so incongrous with a nature hike as you might imagine because it was about cookies, and when I am hiking, I always wish I had cookies in my backpack. Then I listened to a Buddhist Geeks podcast and a bit of a Pema Chodron lecture about how to notice when we are about to act on a negative habit and stop that chain reaction before it gets going. I do actually find Buddhist ideas appropriate on a hike because they make me focused on my surroundings (lovely and teeming with life), on my feelings (My melancholy was still there, but hiking is a delight even when, maybe especially when, one is melancholy.), and on the sensations of moving my body (my chest rising and falling chest, my feet raised and then planted again). Hiking makes it easy to put Buddhist ideas immediately into action.

As I walked, I fell into a rhythm, a breathing, arm-swinging, foot planting rhythm, and myself as metronome is much less melancholy than myself as academic. My feeling never went away, but I was no longer a person who felt, only a person who moved and looked and breathed. I completely forgot about wanting a cookie. Puritans probably knew this: you walk, you hunt, you mend, you read the Bible, you weave, you cook, you pray. And the rhythm of a life of doing leaves little room for the melancholy of the idle rich or the academic.

DisIdentification with Cheerfulness

This morning, I am feeling blah, just kind of lethargic and uninterested and mildly gloomy. As I casually worked in the kitchen, I said to myself, "I just don't feel like myself today."

Luckily, I caught myself and thought, "That doesn't make sense. You are obviously yourself right now. Say a more realistic thing." The true thing is that I usually feel cheerful and interested in many things and excited to start my day and motivated about the work I will do in it. But I also sometimes feel less cheerful, even morose. I feel a variety of things, and none of them define my identity in some fixed way. My identity (if it even makes sense to talk about it, not sure yet) is constantly in flux. Sometimes I feel one thing, sometimes another.

What I was practicing was disintentification--not defining myself by one characteristic, cheerfulness, and calling another characteristic alien. I was practicing not categorizing every experience (my own experiences!) as me or not me.

Why does it matter? I have a habit, one that is shared by many people, I think, of deciding what I am and assuming that I will always be that. I tend to imagine that there is some unchanging essence that is my core, my unchanging self. I don't actually think that belief tracks with the evidence. My personality has shifted in subtle and in obvious ways. My beliefs and values have changed. My emotions change, not just in the moment; over time, the proportions, intensity, and physical manifestations of my emotions have changed. I can't imagine what the core of me could possibly be beyond these things that obviously change.

When these changes happen, my feeling that the changes are wrong somehow, unnatural, catastrophic, that they mean a painful shift to being an entirely new person with a new identity that must be understood (because it too must be fixed) causes me a lot of pain and suffering, the suffering of not actually believing and acting on a true thing. If my identity cannot be nailed down in this fixed way, being out of sync with that truth would of course cause me distress. It's not fun when the things that happen are not in accordance with one's model of reality, especially when we don't change the model as quick as may be.

So this morning, I worked on my model. I disidentified with cheerfulness, reminded myself that I feel many things, embraced a melancholy mood as a part of myself, and looked impermanence squarely in the face. And because thinking in accordance with the actual evidence is so pleasurable, I feel a little bit more cheerful.