Wisdom & Inspiration at Your Feet
How an urban walk can brighten your day — and cure writer’s block in the bargain. A photo essay
When all else fails, I go for a walk.
Walks are not just good for your health and well-being. Sometimes the message you need — — how about some stranger suggesting you’re worth your weight in gold, on a day when you’ve been feeling down? — — is in front of your very eyes. Or more specifically, at your feet.
Equal to looking upwards to the beauty of the skies, here’s an alternative:
Watch your step.
How many story ideas, for example, suggest themselves through a monkey wrench embedded in several blocks of relatively new sidewalk? The pain of a nearby neighbor? An old song by the Foo Fighters? New challenges cast in the stone of adjoining artfully aged cement. . .
Maybe there’s nothing here but a reminder of our shared humanity. So many anonymous strangers sharing the same planet, sending messages into the universe.
Sometimes an unknown hand seems simply to want to offer direction. On almost any day — a down day, or exuberant one — the discovery of a compass stenciled next to a traffic signal control box can take on a new, very personal meaning.
What’s my next direction?
At other times a sidewalk message can break your heart.
How alone would you have to feel to crouch on cold concrete and spell out your despair in cherry red nail polish? A later passerby is left to hope that the added stars suggest optimism, or the smiley face indicates a turn toward whimsy.
From any angle, though, there’s a story here.
On other blocks there are essays.
The above collection may have taken a village. Ignoring the fact that a night or two of San Francisco fog will spell the end of them all, these blocks offer messages within messages.
If only the lonely nail polish-writer might have stumbled across these eager friends.
At times, along the walkway, the message is unwritten.
A plucky dandelion or two taking root in the gritty cracks fronting an empty building. Beauty through perseverance. Nature wins.
Full disclosure: these snapshots were taken on multiple walks. I still look up toward the infinite beauty of the skies — but there’s another world of wonder along the common footpath.
