Malibu morning picture of the day - Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Dear family, friends, and gentle readers,

It is Wednesday, and here is the view from the coast.

 The cloud cover is over us today instead of farther out to sea, giving us that luminous ceiling of white. Mid 60's in temperature when I arrived.

600+ paces from bottom of the hill to my
building (to the right of the tower).
-photo from my employer's website

It's about 600 uphill steps from the bus stop to my office door. I had to stand part of the way from Santa Monica to Malibu and so my ankles and knees were killing me when I alighted the bus. It's quite taxing walking up those 600 paces, so I decided on a hunch to go up the hill "tai-chi" walking style, modified.

If you've never taken a tai-chi lesson, there is a way of advancing forward by setting your forward foot at about a 30-degree angle and then you gradually transfer weight from the back leg to the front leg, but before you got into complete stasis, you've already set the step in motion for the next transfer so that your body weight is never fully borne in the walking process. This is probably a valuable skill in deploying a martial art.

The same sort of weightlessness occurs when you come down stairs, lightly and quickly on the edge of the steps. You notice this kind of thing when you have chronically achy knees and what activities relieve pain even for a second. The problem with coming down stairs is when you hit the bottom and you have no plan for transferring the momentum. I do this in the stairwells at work, but when I hit bottom or a landing I purposely run into the wall and slam the wall my bent forearms and that seems to do the trick. I try not to do it when anyone is watching. ("Oh my God! Are you OK?" is the response you elicit.)

Caterpillar off to find
his next meal. And here
I thought cement sidewalks
were smooth...

Upon reaching my usual stopping point to snap the morning picture I found that while I had broken a sweat of exertion as normal, my knees and ankles felt stretched and flexible, and were not inflamed with the burn of lactic acid. It took longer, but the walk was surprisingly easy. When you do that kind of walk you watch the ground and you see little guys like this going by.

He reminded me that the karma lesson that my Buddhist forefathers would tell me is that if I unconsciously squashed him underfoot underway, I would accrue no karma. If I purposely stepped on him, I would accrue. I suspect that now that I have made myself aware of his path, I now no longer get a free pass for unconscious creature-slaughter, but probably not the full freight. Is it any wonder that Buddhist-influenced Chinese wound up being so uptight-frugal about cost? This is why I've always tended to run with the Taoists (in which tradition is tai-chi mentioned above) who are more about figuring out how to move around easily within world about you.

I hope you find the easy way to move around in your world today. Don't kill anybody.

Love,
Pops