An Unhurried Life
What a leisurely walk around a familiar lake taught me about being present
This afternoon I went for a walk.
Not a walk for exercise.
Not a walk with a destination.
Just a walk.
It lasted about two and a half hours around Lake Merritt in Oakland, a place I have walked many times before. I wasn’t trying to learn anything. I wasn’t searching for an insight. After several days of deep conversations with life, I simply felt drawn outside.
As I began walking, I noticed something familiar.
My body was relaxed.
My mind was quiet.
I had discovered only the night before, while listening to music, that there are moments when thought simply disappears. I had lain on my couch listening to songs I hadn’t heard in decades. One song led to another, then another. For over an hour I existed in a state I could barely describe. There were no questions to answer, no problems to solve, no destination to reach.
I simply was.
I wondered whether that experience belonged only to music.
The walk answered the question.
It didn’t.
The music had not created the stillness.
Neither did the walk.
They had both invited me into the same way of being.
As I wandered around the lake, I found myself stopping constantly.
Not because there was something extraordinary to see.
Because I had begun to notice.
I stopped to photograph a twisted old tree whose trunk had become a sculpture through decades of wind and weather.
I watched a pelican glide effortlessly across the water before settling with remarkable dignity, as though it knew exactly where it belonged.
I noticed children’s sailboats scattered across the lake like moving brushstrokes.
I found a totem pole I had somehow never seen before, despite years of walking these same paths.
I discovered that Lake Merritt is America’s first wildlife refuge.
I paused before a memorial to children lost to violence.
I lingered beneath enormous trees whose shadows spread intricate patterns across the grass.
None of these things had appeared overnight.
They had always been there.
What had changed was not the lake.
It was me.
Or perhaps even that is not quite true.
Nothing in me had become different.
I had simply become available.
That thought stopped me.
How much of life do we fail to see, not because it is hidden, but because we are elsewhere?
Elsewhere in our thoughts.
Elsewhere in our plans.
Elsewhere in our worries.
Elsewhere in the conversation inside our own heads.
Presence, I was beginning to realize, is not something we manufacture.
It is what remains when our minds stop insisting on being somewhere else.
One encounter stays with me.
A young man was standing beside the path selling copies of his first book.
I stopped to talk with him.
We spoke about writing.
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I mentioned that I had written several books myself.
He searched for one of them on Amazon and found it.
We wished each other well, and I continued walking.
A few steps later, I stopped.
Something in me wanted to turn back.
There was no reason.
No calculation.
No obligation.
I simply returned, bought his book, and asked him to sign it.
He smiled and wrote,
“Much love to my author homie. I appreciate you for coming back for me.”
His words touched me more deeply than he could have known.
Not because they praised me.
Because they revealed something simple.
Our brief encounter had mattered to him.
I realized that I had not bought merely a book.
I had acknowledged another human being.
The exchange had become part of both our lives.
How many such moments pass unnoticed each day because we are too hurried to see them?
As I continued walking, another realization quietly emerged.
People often ask me what it means to live in the present moment.
For years I searched for an answer in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality.
This afternoon, I stopped searching.
I was living it.
Presence was not a technique.
It was not concentration.
It was not trying to be mindful.
It felt far simpler than that.
My body was relaxed.
My mind was quiet.
Life was free to enter.
As I looked across the lake one last time, I understood something I had missed for most of my life.
The ordinary is never merely ordinary.
It only appears ordinary when we are absent.
When we become fully available, the ordinary quietly reveals itself as extraordinary.
The tree.
The pelican.
The sailboats.
The stranger.
The handwritten note inside a newly purchased book.
None of them had changed.
I had.
Or perhaps I had simply stopped getting in the way.
That afternoon I returned home with photographs.
But the photographs were not what I had really brought back.
I had brought back a different rhythm.
The rhythm of an unhurried life.
And I wondered, perhaps for the first time, whether this is what I had been searching for all along.
Not a different world.
Just the willingness to be fully present in this one.
