The antidote for dullness, that enemy of vitality, is to be in an ongoing state of re-amazement. It is an essential nutrient that feeds my aliveness. Despite my amusing delusion that I am a new variety of professional athlete and need to train like a Type-A devotee, I really do love a gentle walk about town. It is fall, my favorite season for both its colors and the subtle fragrance of fallen leaves. It is the season that most reminds me of my childhood, when the essential teenage chore was raking and bagging leaves. I never enjoyed raking. It was a brain-numbingly boring activity for an expansion-minded teen, but I did love the smells.
Here, next to the East River, I am in the habit of getting out in the weather—rain, shine, or in between—and marveling at the colors reflected off the water, before I have my coffee and rock out in the gym. Who knew there was such a powerful spectrum of color and intensity available on the humble East River? Seeing this and walking on the parklands the city has created fills me with that needed sense of re-amazement. Aliveness activated. The water is as it always has been, and I could treat my morning walk as a checkmark in the step count activity box of the day, using the time to listen to an informative podcast whose value will fade within hours, or I could choose to be present to every changing luminosity coming off the water. Both of these are forms of walking, but one will leave me with an ego-driven false sense of having learned something of note, while the other engages my re-amazement at what an incredible thing it is to be alive.
My current world is filled with striving, with building something quite special. AGEIST and Super Age are entities to which I feel a substantial devotion to and pride for worthy projects that engage and enliven me. However, it is the simple, the constant, the forgotten-unless-carefully-examined daily surroundings that re-amaze me, bring a smile to my face, and make me feel as if I am a small, insignificant grain of sand amongst billions of other grains. It is possible to be both empowered and insignificant. The projects I am involved with creating are special; I, however, in the course of human history, am profoundly less so. What a relief.
Onward and upward,
David Stewart
