Recent walks

I’ve been walking after lunch most days and I’ve started taking the same photograph each time, at the spot where there’s a good vista. It makes a nice place to turn around.

August 11, 2020

I’ve been doing this walk, almost every day for a couple of months. It’s just under two miles round trip on the straight flat road of my neighborhood.

October 16, 2020

I’ve taken a lot more than these two photographs but they make for a striking contrast. I don’t quite have a strained metaphor for my own life the last couple of months or in the last year. A lot has changed and a lot hasn’t.

I’m on sabbatical and I’m learning and working and moving through the project I outlined both faster and slower than I’d hoped. Overall, I’d say I’m on schedule and generally enjoying the time I have to work at home. I always struggle with managing that time though, even more acutely since I am the only one accountable for it. (And I want to look back on the span of months, weeks, and days from mid-August to January with a sense of having done a lot of work, well.) It always feels I *could* or _should_ be doing more…but it’s also a traumatic, stressful, deeply worrying time we are all living through. Being kind to myself as much as I can (and to others) is perhaps in any time and especially now, the best way to survive this year and those to follow it.