I've walked the same route to work for almost two years and have memorized many other routes to the shops, flea markets and taxi ranks. My familiarity with the route means I have switched off, thinking mostly about negotiating traffic and people moving at the same pace as I am. That feeling of sameness begins to creep into your life and you're eventually walking it. I feel like Josh Radnor's character, Jesse, in the film Liberal Arts (2012) who feels time passing at what must be a painfully slow pace, with New York city and its people blending into concrete slabs. That is until an encounter with Zebby, played by Elisabeth Olsen (a student at the university he once attended), who allows him to appreciate his passage into new areas of life, where we age, we cry and we do more than just simply breath while we trudge from one day to the next. Through Zebby, Jesse is introduced to Beethoven and various other writers of glorious music and grows to love opera music.
Walks through New York City for Jesse become more magical with opera playing as the soundtrack to his encounters with sidewalks and people who appear to be more beautiful and more welcoming then they did before. I do this on my walks too. I walk with music filtering through my mind. Some music makes me feel more adventurous on my 'sameness' walks and there are certain songs which slow down the rushing that all walkers become accustomed to. I realize that we don't have to keep walking the same routes. In Liberal Arts, Richard Jenkin's character Professor Peter Hoberg suggests that if we become trapped in places of sameness and redundant patterns we become prisoners. When we are fearful of changing our routes or being in a space other than what we are accustomed to we retreat as prisoners walking the same path everyday. This blog is an acceptance of meeting different paths, making all routes interesting and peaking behind doors just a little bit...even if the prospect of change or a different path appearing may seem frightening at first.
