the Way of the Turtle

"There Are No Ordinary Moments"
11.5 Mile Ride at the Corning Preserve & Schuyler Flatts Cultural Park
Monday, June 8, 2009

Took the bike out for a short easy ride down at the Corning Preserve this evening... kept the gears fairly low to give my sore legs a break. One nice thing about riding there in the evening is the greater likelihood of seeing deer, rabbits, and so on... plus there are usually fewer people on the path.

Earlier in the day I watched the movie "Peaceful Warrior" , which is based on a book I read around 16 years ago, "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior" by Dan Millman. I remember finding a lot of worthwhile ideas in the book when I read it, though I have to admit it was so long ago that the specifics are pretty hazy. While I found the movie fairly enjoyable, I thought the "deep lessons" were pretty basic, which has me wondering - did they just take the simplest material for the movie, or have I come far enough in the last dozen years that concepts I once found intensely thought-provoking are now pretty obvious? I may have to re-read the book again to see what I think about it now...

As I was riding tonight I stopped periodically to take pictures (surprise, surprise) and found myself thinking about one of the lessons from the book and movie - the idea that "there are no ordinary moments", which I take to mean that every moment in our lives has the capacity to be unique and special, if only we recognize it. As is often the case, tonight I shot photos of a variety of subjects - robins, ducks, rabbits, deer, a heron - that I've taken hundreds of photos of before. Sometimes Ann shakes her head at the fact that I will stop to take yet another half dozen pictures of a squirrel or sparrow, when we see them just about every day... but I never get tired of taking pictures of them, and I think part of that is a recognition that each one is special in some way, and while a photo is an imperfect method of capturing that moment - it's the best method I've got, at least for a very visual person like me. In some ways I think it's my unspoken recognition of the "no ordinary moments" idea.

OK, enough deep thought... we'll see how the legs are feeling tomorrow, which will determine whether tomorrow or Wednesday is my first post-NIPMUCK run. All I know for sure is I need to get my legs back in gear before my last long run in preparation for the Finger Lakes 50k on July 4th.

JMH