A Walk in the Park
I’ve been retired now for four months. Every day I wake up with a sense of relief that I am no longer working. This has surprised me. I never hated my job, frequently found the work I did rewarding and liked the people I worked with. Nonetheless, even with all these positive qualities, having to work meant my time was not my own.
Now it is.
This gives me a lot of opportunities to do things that I like. I visit museums, go out on photography expeditions, spend mornings in cafés, watch a lot of DVDs and read a lot. But one thing I really like to do is just to go for a walk.
The closest place to my house for a good walk is a little park called Millar Park.
It’s not really a lot to look at. A rectangular park on a hill top. A ring of trees around the perimeter and a concrete walking and cycling trail. One small pavilion in the center, a public toilet and children’s play area divide the park in two.
Each half of the park is one end has a baseball batting area, the other a soccer field.
That’s it. Nothing grand at all. No great monuments, no dazzling view in any direction.
It’s circled by roads and small residential houses. This is not a wealthy part of town and it shows.
I have been around this little park many times. I do a minimum of two laps on the trail. Most of the time I have a camera with me. I take photographs of the same scenes over and over again. Sometimes with film, sometimes with a digital camera. Sometimes color, sometime black and white. I may photograph the same scene over and over, but I mix it up a lot — I try a lot of different lenses.
I take maybe four or five photographs each time I go. Many turn out looking much like other ones I’ve taken. But never exactly alike. As they collect over time, I see a collage of time and season filling out, piece by piece, and always with room for another. This is a never ending series.
By rights, I should feel saturated by these images; after all, are they really nothing more than a series of unremarkable snapshots? But I don’t. What they are doing is making a comment on the uniqueness and marvel of occupying that time and space. By their very ordinariness, they show me that every moment of my life is special, each an unreproducible element that it is all too easy to devalue by failing to embrace the present.
By translating the cliché ‘a walk in the park’ into an active reality, I’ve somehow transformed the assumption of an easy lack of involvement into the opposite — a deeply considered examination of the meaning of time. Each walk takes on aspects of deep study and reflection; mindfulness without any of the trendy trappings. This is a very ordinary park after all.
Therein lies its enormous value.
