I am not sure of when I acquired a sense of restlessness. Perhaps it is a characteristic driven by DNA, though perhaps it is simply habit. A long time ago I spent over two years on an aircraft carrier in Japan, and the ship was rarely in port for more than two weeks at a stretch, so I got used to coming and going. Sometimes we would simply float around the ocean; sometimes we would visit other ports. If I wasn't working when we were tied to the pier, I spent my free time wandering, on the base and off. And, more often than not, I wandered alone, something that being the only boy in a family of seven made me quite used to. If I had been able to speak Japanese, I would have wandered farther than I did, but I have never admitted to being especially brave. I was comfortable walking around Yokosuka; I was always comforted visiting Kamakura.
Then I came home and got a job delivering furniture before starting college, and I found that I was happier being in motion than not. Maybe, in that sense, college was good--I was always busy, since I also worked at night. I got married just a couple of years after the navy, and our first son was born not long afterward. Then I was busy for years after three more sons were born, after I returned to college for graduate school, after I started teaching part-time at night.
And still--restlessness, wanting to be moving, visiting, traveling, experiencing. Backpacking is good. Soccer was good. Riding my bike remains good. Occasional business travel has been good. Six months ago there was something very good: 13 days of solo traveling in England and Scotland. It was also a purely selfish act, and I'm now working on ways to describe the journey. Stay tuned.
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Stafford and Ammons wrote about walking's and writing's symbiotic relationship. And there's a Latin expression that is something like "solvitur ambulando"---I was a poor, at best, Latin student in High School---which translates to "it is solved by walking." Kierkegaard himself believed walking was a sure-fire way to solve one's problems. But maybe poems, and solutions to life's gnarly problems, are actually fortunate by-products of our real reason for walking---our restlessness. Our need to be in motion.
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