Take a Walk on the South Side

Mornings, I walk. After an early caffeine binge with the enforcers, I pace out the southend of the city one step at a time moving as quickly as my back will allow. I tell people the walk was recommended by my therapist, and there is that, but I really walk to get a feel for what it's going to be like to be the Genome for the day. The walk is quick but it's mindful.

I like the people I see out and about in the early morning. They are people with a purpose and I wonder what it would be like to be a purposeful person. I try to have purpose but no matter how hard I try, it seems that I am living just to be here. Time and Place. That's the stuff I see as important. I'd like to think that what I do is important but, there again, it seems the universe has it's own agenda. I'm just suppose to do something, almost anything, and that seems to be enough. More than that, it seems to be everything.

I don't expect you to agree. I'm not a fool. I know that everyone else in the entire world lives life with the idea that it has meaning and that they have purpose. I'm happy for them. I admire them.

I watch the barista from Trinidad who makes the little faces and hearts and fern leaves in the lattes and I wonder if it would be possible for someone without purpose in their life to do that. Even though I feel that I don't know what I'm doing, it feels somehow, and this is the salient point, that I have been chosen for the role. I am chosen to blunder through life hoping that something meaningful will happen.

This morning, pacing the south side mindfully and feeling the anger--and the pain in the upper back--I stopped on the sidewalk and began doing Swimming Dragon, followed by Parting the Clouds and then finishing with Embracing Heaven and Earth.

I was near a storm drain, and that mundane piece of municipal infrastructure became a metaphor for the neural networks in the shadowy region of my brain that support my depression. My qigong moves became fierce--my way of shouting down the storm drain of the mind, "I'm chosen! So don't mess with me, Amy!"

When I stood up a dozen people were moving around me doing whatever they do at this hour. Upper-dressed young women going to work at Nordstrom's; corporate ID-tag bearers heading to Panera's for coffee and bagels; cargo pant-ed leaf blowers. All looking at me.

"Had to be done," I said.

They all nodded and continued on their way because they all know what it's like to be messed with. And they instinctively knew that I was yelling in the right direction. Down the storm drain.