I’m grateful for the pop-up oyster place last night. I’m grateful for waking up with a sense of peace. I’m grateful for seeing what was always there. I’m grateful for a new favorite cookie. I’m grateful for falling into a life I love. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Happy Friday. I’m back at the Coffee Collective this morning and I brought my laptop this time. The music is not quite as serendipitous as it was yesterday but things are very okay. I fly home tomorrow morning and I did entertain some thoughts about extending the trip. I began thinking about maybe Helsinki or Prague or something for a few more days and that made me laugh. I do love my alcoholic brain: “This was great, maybe a little more?” I’ve ridden that train a time or two and it always seems to end up at the same place.
This has been a great trip for me and it’s been unexpectedly emotional. To be fair, life has become unexpectedly emotional; I guess that’s what happens when you stop drinking three or four bottles of wine a day to keep the curtains drawn. I’ve been much less focused since arriving in Copenhagen. It’s an incredibly walkable city and have been doing a lot of aimless wandering. Well, maybe how someone from New York interprets “aimless wandering.”
I’m not sure there is anything I love more in the world than putting in my airpods and heading out for a long walk. My walking style, honed from decades of traversing airports at high speed, is frankly, probably too aggressive. I like going fast. I like swerving in and out of slow-moving packs of people.1 I like spotting the fast-closing hole ten or fifteen feet in front of me, accelerating and breaking into the secondary. All of it mediated by a playlist that contains too many examples of shockingly bad musical taste. Like this song:
Anyway, the walking has been fantastic here. I think a lot of important stuff happens while I’m walking. While I’m focused on the gaggle of slow-walkers ahead, things are spinning around in my head. Sentences pop out of nowhere and I try to come up with mnemonic tricks to remember them later, because I know that if I stop or slow down, the thought will vanish. I work things out in the background while I walk. Things become a lot clearer when I walk. Things are always better when I walk. So, I think I’m going to keep on walking.2
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Why do the slowest walkers insist on the center of the sidewalk?
And now you have to ask yourself whether this whole thing was just a set-up so that I could put in a link to one of my favorite songs of all time?
“This was great, maybe a little more?”
Hitting a little close to home today. Cranking up Bananarama on my treadmill walk, though, and pretending I’m in NYC dodging slow walkers.
Why do slow walkers insist on the center of the sidewalk AND walking side by side in packs of 3-4?