surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st century.

Another lazy day. We've been entertaining and I've had too much to do to get in as much walking as I would have liked. Still, I got in a 3.52 mile walk yesterday afternoon. I walked from lunch on hawthorne, over the burnside bridge, and to both the deschutes and rogue breweries. I had hoped to continue the trip on foot, but we got our brewery tour off to a late start, it got cold, and not everyone else is as into walking as I am.

I've spent a good portion of the past few days in a particularly more "doomer" mood than usual, which is to say I'm not very optimistic about my/our future in the least.

I guess that's not entirely true.

I'm firmly convinced that the future I always grew up expecting will never materialize. I'm frustrated that everything I've prepared myself for up to this point may be completely irrelevant in the new future. I'm frustrated because I don't know what the future will hold, and because that doesn't give me much to comfortably plan for. I'm frustrated because I was always told that I could be anything that I wanted, and do whatever I wanted, and that it was completely within my own power to be and do those things; and as it turns out, there are greater forces working against those kinds of dreams and aspirations. What you have and what you do are not just products of what you put in, but products of the opportunities you're given and choose to take.

I was raised to expect a world ripe with such opportunities, but it's hard not to feel that the kind of opportunities I've been groomed to exploit are much like many other resources we've come to rely on these days... dwindling.

Still, after I get past the frustrations of my failed expectations, I'm comforted by the idea of a future with more tangible, honest, and meaningful opportunities than any I've previously come to expect. Life without the things I was always promised can also be a life without the stresses that I'd later realize come with them.

What does walking have to do with any of this?

Everything.

It's about self reliance, and realizing that life wouldn't be so bad for me if we were forced to do without the crutches on which we've all been leaning. It's about freeing myself from the shackles we've created with our ignorant and unrealistically optimistic speculations and expectations.

It's a start. It might not be much, but at least I feel like I've started to do something about it.

March 6th

3.52 miles today
51.36 miles cumulative
2.054 total gallons saved