I have discovered I have a problem when I go out for a walk on my own.
I start thinking.
That revelation in itself probably came as a surprise to a lot of people who know me and were not aware of me thinking at any time.
Well, it’s true. Admittedly, sometimes my thinking is along the lines of “How do we know that we all see the same colours?”
For instance, we can all agree (I hope) that the sky (when there are no clouds and no forest fire smoke) is blue. But is what I call ‘blue’ the same colour as what you call ‘blue’? There is no easy way I can see to test this, since we have all grown up being told that the sky is blue, the grass is green and fire engines are red. And then when we see something else which is the same colour as one of those items, we assign it the same colour word.
But what if you could, somehow, see the world through my eyes? I don’t mean in the “walk a mile in my shoes’ sense,” but literally. If you could see the world through my eyes, would the sky still look what you would call ‘blue’ or would it be the colour you have always called ‘green’?
I don’t see this as having any great ramifications on the world, since we all agree on what colour everything is, whether it’s the same ‘colour’ we both see or not.
Anyway, as I said some time ago (check back to the lead paragraph), I tend to start thinking when I go for a walk by myself.
What happens then, and this is not necessarily a bad thing, is that I tend to forget to walk the route I had planned to when I started. For instance, I may have intended to walk south on Tabor from Fifth to Fifteenth, then east to Jarvis and then back home.
If I’m involved in some heavy thinking, though, I frequently find myself at the corner of Fifteenth and Ospika, which means a fair bit longer walk than I had figured on.
The good news is I have yet to come out of my thinking-induced ‘coma’ and find myself in Vanderhoof.
The bad news is most of the time my legs were going for the walk under the assumption we were going on the original route. When it turns out we’re walking farther than planned, they tend to get sore and upset.
Add to that the (approximately) 90-degree hill I need to climb to get to the apartment parking lot and then the (approximately) 500 steps I need to climb to get to my apartment, my legs are usually VERY upset by the time we get home.
I guess I’m going to have to stop thinking when I go for a walk.