Let’s go for a walk.

Walking is well established as a metaphor for conversation. The conceptual architecture is similar. Conversations can meander, they can be rushed, they can be too fast to follow. We talk sometimes for pleasure, and sometimes towards a specific goal. We find ourselves straying from the point. Some conversations don’t go anywhere. In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, walking and talking are wrapped around each other. The things we say are part of our spiritual journey. Our words take us places. That’s a feature of language, rather than specifically the spoken word: Bunyan’s text is also meant to edify. It is part of the journey that it portrays.

I walked nine kilometers home today. This might sound counter-intuitive, but I was up sick last night, and my system felt gummed. I needed a blast of exercise to clear it away. And it was nice out, so I walked home past a book shop in the city and bought Leaves of Grass. I’ve been feeling gross for a while, really. I’ve barely been able to write. That’s why I published a short story recently. Maybe I haven’t mentioned this, but I’m exploring writing fiction at the moment. I have a goal to write maybe a dozen short stories by the end of the year – I have nine, currently, and I think I’ve put up five or six here. I won’t publish all of them. They’re test pieces. I hadn’t planned on publishing the last one, to be honest, but my head was foggy and I couldn’t focus. So I put up ‘visitation’, which I finished sometime in September. Then I was up sick last night, and I thought – well, resting hasn’t helped, I’ll try the other thing. And I walked nine kilometers. It worked: my head’s clear, I’ll get a good sleep, and I’m writing again. I composed most of this coming home. Walking turned into talking.

It’s not always the solution, but I do think sometimes the best fix is pushing through. That’s one way to understand the problem with perfectionists. They get so paralyzed by the idea of doing it wrong that they can’t finish anything. It’s a disconnect between where they’re going and how they get there. They want to be further down the track but they don’t like moving towards that goal. In a sense they haven’t come to terms with where they are. So they just stop. The idea of ending up like that – I keep coming back to it. I think it scares me. It’s not how I want to turn out. When I’m sick, when I’m not writing, I walk. I push at it. I go somewhere. That’s what gets me writing again. Sometimes I go back to that perfectionists essay. Each time I return, I find fault with the phrasing. I know I wouldn’t write it the same today. That’s comforting. It means I was right: push through and the writing improves. The essay is part of the process it portrays.

My autism diagnosis is – yes, coming up on two years now. The change has been meteoric – like night and day, to return to Lossky. That’s a more spiritual essay, focusing on concepts of identity and the divine – in a much more pragmatic mode, I’ve learned I have a range of sensory issues that had previously not been identified. Light rips my eyes. Sound stabs into me. I struggle with the sensory load. It sounds slightly stupid – how would you not notice you had these issues? In essence, I had been living in a state of constant panic, more or less permanently overstimulated for the best part of thirty years. It’s only now, only really this last month, after two years of learning and adjustment, that I’ve reached equilibrium. I didn’t know it was possible to feel like this. Partly, I think, you can see the change in the shift from two essays a week down to one. I wrote to outrun the sensory load – to process it, break it down into something I could understand. It was medicinal. After the diagnosis, I had other options. I could reduce the dosage. I didn’t stop writing, but I wrote for different reasons.

I guess I’m still coming to terms with that change of pace. Slowing down is, counter-intuitively, stressful. It’s moving away from a mechanism that helped me to function. It’s not a bad change, it’s just difficult. We find ourselves ever on the road.

Pleasantly and well-suited I walk
Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good.
– Walt Whitman, ‘To Think of Time’