I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Susan Miller Setiawan’s reflection “the way is made by walking.”
This past April, my partner and I returned from Indonesia, where we had spent the previous 4 months leading a semester abroad for the small liberal arts college where I work. Soon after we returned, a friend asked me how I was doing. “Well,” I found myself saying, “I feel like my soul is still back in Indonesia.”
I knew right away that I didn’t say that because Indonesia is filled with warm & lovely people or because I love the culture & the geography there (although it is, and I do). The statement wasn’t about missing Indonesia. Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure at first why those words seemed to pop out without any forethought.
I pondered this for a while and realized here’s the deal: we spent 35 hours traveling home. We flew from Bali to Qatar, on to Dallas-Ft. Worth, and finally to South Bend, spending over 24 hours in the air in addition to lay-overs in airports. We left 90-degree sunny weather in the southern hemisphere and arrived to 45-degree rain in the northern hemisphere. We traveled through 13 time zones.
There is nothing natural about the speed at which Ben & I traveled around the world a few months ago. Yet as I thought about this, I began to realize that “traveling fast” is not an event reserved only for plane travel around the world. In so many ways, nearly every day I outpace my natural traveling speed. I hop in my car to go across town to work. I head out to a specialty store in the next town because they have an ingredient for a dish I want to make. I drive to a nearby walking trail to meet up with a friend (oh, the irony of driving somewhere to walk).
Concerned with mindless fossil fuel use and the faster pace of life in the US, I began to experiment with walking four miles to and from work several times a week, and I discovered several wonderful things. First, rather than feeling frustrated with the time it takes to walk to and from work, the act of lacing my shoes and walking through town resulted in a calmer frame of mind. I hadn’t realized that I felt so busy until that feeling lifted as I began each walk. For the next 75 minutes, I knew right where I would be: here on this path from one end of Goshen to the other. I suddenly felt as though there would be enough time for all the tasks which needed to be done. This still puzzles me; logic tells me that I am using *more* time when I walk which decreases the amount of time I have for other things. Yet, my gut feeling—my inner instinct—was the exact opposite. There suddenly seemed enough time for everything.
A second benefit that I quickly recognized was an unusual sense of physical well-being. For me, there is a clear difference in how my body responds between a 2-mile walk and a 4-mile walk. I’m not walking for exercise, per se (in fact, I like to think of it as “sauntering”), but the endorphins seem to run a bit thicker in the longer walks, and they begin running even earlier than usual (oh, that brain of ours, laying down neurons for things we do over and over again). As I cross College Avenue and start up 8th Street, I have a sense of quiet joy and energy running through my body.
The faith community to which I belong sometimes uses the phrase, “the way is made by walking.” I cannot always think my way into new habits or ways of being in the world; it is the practices and experiments of living in this world that help me fashion a life that feels full of meaning and joy. This is an ongoing life practice, and it is clear to me that it will never be “finished.” For now, the act of walking is simultaneously an experiment in “making the way by walking” and a method of making conscious choices about how I use my time, energy, and my portion of fossil fuels at this time in my life. I wonder where it will take me and how it will shape my life.
Among other things, Susan Miller Setiawan (she/her) spends her time teaching, gardening, baking sourdough bread & speculoos cookies, walking to work, repainting various rooms in her house, reading, and playing trivial pursuit. She and her partner Ben enjoy their 3 young adult children, a daughter-in-law, 2 unruly dogs, and a cat named Sushi.
