My World is 674 Steps

Already a week on isolated islands of Guna Yala.

My world is six hundred and seventy four steps. It has been only this long for a week, and will stay so for another few days. I don’t mind. A small physical world on the heels of travel opens the expansive inner space for thinking. I wanted it so.

The length of my world is fluid. The first time I measured it on my run, the pent up energy of the previous sea passage and my rested body extended the running strides. My world was five hundred ninety steps long. Two days ago, I was exhausted, and the tide was high. It pushed me into the lapping water on the east end of the island. The shorter stride, longer world - seven hundred and two steps. But yesterday, it was what I told you.

Coco Island - 674 steps around.

Today, I turned to the right after hauling the dinghy onshore. The counterclockwise direction for the next three laps on the narrow patch of sand around the palms. Then I turn around to run clockwise. The beach is slanted, sharply cambered to the sea. I can see it and feel it in my ankles and knees. So I follow the clock hand then reverse to maintain the equal strain on each side of my body. Twenty nine laps planned today. A nice prime number.

I won’t make it. I know it by lap four. It is just too hot.

No one is on the island, but my dog running along, picking up and carrying a succession of coconuts in his maw. And my wife lifting a twelve pound weight in a palm shade. The dog is compelled to follow me by past breeders selecting for hunting genes, but my wife makes her own choices. Oh, I know it. I would love it if she ran with me too. But she cares not.

You may think it is boring. Lap after lap of the same beach, of the same logs to jump over, and the same soft patches of sand that mire my stride. A treadmill. But you are wrong. Each lap is a deviation of direction and an experiment in physics of placing a foot on another log each time, and timing the waves. I run through the water at its shallowest, when only ankles are submerged, and the foot can escape the suction of the wave.

Boredom is not repetition, but a lack of attention.

There are new things ignored for days. I notice them once everything else becomes familiar. I have observed a shack with a pink panga across the cut on the neighboring island. Only a suggestion of locals in the clothes drying on the line, but never a sighting. They are ghosts to me. I have not seen them embodied.

Today, I notice a grill across the cut, right next to the shack. It is old. Or maybe it is new. In the tropics a brand new car turns to a pile of rust by the evening. But the grill is disused, or I would see the smoke drifting away from it sometimes in the last seven days. I have not. The ghosts don’t eat.

Maybe I insist on the ghosts because I resist the emptiness. Emptiness asks to be filled. What if no one is there any longer? I choose not to accept the thought. The shack can’t outlive the people who built it. It can’t become just wood returning to the jungle. They are gone for the weekend, I decide. They have not left for good to escape the smallness of their world.

I trip on a log. It was not there yesterday. Then I see that it was. There is that intersection of branches looking like two hands commanding me to halt. It is the same log but in a new place after the strong winds and waves of last night. The log is the same actor playing a new role in a new set. Nothing is new. Nothing is the same. This can never be boring.

But those are things, the outer world. Inside your head, there is another world. Give it an uninterrupted chance, cut off the tyranny of daily tasks, and your own mind becomes an interesting friend. It happens when I am running. On lap eleven. Or mile six. Or not today, but tomorrow. I don’t know when it happens to you. But likely when all else is boring.

Twenty four laps is all I make. I crash into the water and float. Hot.

We go back to Monona, our sailboat home, and we work. Zoom meetings, code, optimization algorithms for data too big to comprehend. Lunch. Discussions with the team half a world away. Just work. You know. Unless, you transcended the need to make your monthly check.

But then it is over, and the closed laptop lid collapses the world back to the tiny space of six hundred and seventy four steps. It is enough.

We float at the beach, a canned Mojito in hand. I point to the shack across the cut. It is solitary and miles away from the mainland. I ask, “Alex, if you had to live in this shack for the rest of your life and only eat what is in the sea, but it is plentiful…”. She nods, she knows the game… “And you could have people visiting you, once a month for three days. Would you want them to bring the exquisite food or books? It could only be either for the rest of your life.”

She shakes her head. “No.” She hates the questions. She thinks, “Maybe food.” She laughs. “I will write my own books.”

At first, I am surprised. Alex loves to read. Yet, I also know the slow decay of joy when every meal becomes the same. So maybe food, and write my own books?

I wonder about it all evening. Confined to an isolated patch of land, could I sustain my inner world on my own? If I am the only reflection of experience? I come to realize I can’t. I think of volleyball Wilson, conjured by Tom Hanks, his anthropomorphized face bouncing back ideas at a new angle. Wilson tries but he is a poor substitute for books, and no substitute for people. Antagonists challenge us, sympathizers support us, but both advance what we notice and know.

Two weeks of quiet life, or even a year, will deepen what I know with time to chisel expansive concepts from the raw material of past experience. But my capacity for attention will die in solitude. I will stop noticing. Even when running. So, the same reef fish for food. But the books, in the end.