Life @thebeach can be fun — think sun, think beach, think sand, think water. Now think half-naked female bods trying desperately to acquire a suntan. There’s no harm in looking — and I certainly never perv! Anyway, my wife confiscated my binoculars years ago…

On May 31, 1991, Minnie Munro, age 102, married Dudley Reid, age 83, in Point Claire, New South Wales, Australia.

So my friends, at age 83 dear old Dudley was still able to find someone to hug. I find that a comforting thought.

Today it’s a sunny 18 degrees C. Problem is, it was sunny at 5:30AM when the love of my life woke and asked me to walk the dog. It’s not that I have anything against walking — I can do it just fine. But around here, walking has taken on a new significance.

Now when you walk, it’s exercise.

The kind of slow walking I grew up with, and liked… you know, the kind of walking that allows you to experience things along the way. The kind of walking that encouraged you to stop to enjoy a conversation with other blokes who are also walking their poodles. Well, it’s that kind of walking that’s been hijacked by the health and diet police.

Now the only real kind of walking requires a personal trainer, a mandatory set of hand weights, an iPod and of course a bottle of mineral water strapped to your waiste. You need to wear the right gear and to striding-out arms swinging with eyes fixed doggedly forward. It’s an interesting look!

Every day I watch people walking this way and can’t help thinking they have more than a few screws loose. Besides being fixated, they don’t seem to want to take any time to smell the roses or enjoy the sweet air of the morning. And when you give them a polite g’day they certainly not interested in stopping to have a convo. Also, they seem to produce an incredible overabundance of sweat, which I am sure is not good for the environment.

Exercise has become a statement — a way of defining who you are. So, as of today, I decided I’m not going to join that crowd — and I’m going to implement a strict no-walking regime. Anyway, I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing a pedometer.

I am of a roving disposition, but I travel not to see imposing monuments, which indeed somewhat bore me, nor beautiful scenery, of which too soon I tire; I travel to see men. And I avoid the great. I would not cross the road to meet a president or a king; I am content to know the writer in the pages of his book and the painter in his picture; but I have journeyed a hundred leagues to see a missionary of whom I have heard a strange story, and I have spent a fortnight in a vile hotel in order to improve my acquaintance with a billiard-marker.

I should be inclined to say that I am not surprised to meet any sort of person were it not that there is one sort which never fails to give me a little shock of amused astonishment. This is the elderly Englishwoman, generally of adequate means, who is to be found living alone in the most unexpected places. You do not wonder when you hear of her living in a villa on a hill outside a small Italian town, the only Englishwoman in the neighbourhood, and you are almost prepared for it when a lonely hacienda is pointed out to you in Andalusia and you are told that in it has dwelt for many years an English lady. But it is more surprising when you hear that the only white person in a Chinese city is an Englishwoman, not a missionary, who lives there none knows why; and you are completely at a loss to explain why another should inhabit an island in the South Seas, and a third a bungalow on the outskirts of a large village in Java.

They live solitary lives, without friends, and they do not welcome the stranger. Though they may not have seen one of their own race they will pass you on the road as though they did not see you, and if, presuming on your nationality, you should call as likely as not they will decline to receive you; but if they do they will give you a cup of tea from a silver teapot and on a plate of old Worcester you will find Scotch scones. They will talk to you politely, as though they were entertaining you in a Kentish vicarage, but when you take your leave will show no particular desire to continue the acquaintance. One wonders in vain what strange instinct it is that has driven them to separate themselves from their kith and kin and thus to live apart from all their natural interests in an alien land.

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The title of Matsuo Basho’s most famous travelogue, Narrow Road to the Interior, plays on his concern for the heart of things. His book reveals that the journey itself is the destination.

In it he writes:

A lifetime adrift in a boat or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

George Hartley | Link