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Message |
| Posted By: |
UT |
| Date: |
9-Dec-2007-15:16:12 |
| Subject: |
¿Caminar o pasear? |
This is one of those December days that you move to
a beach town in Spain FOR. The sky is perfectly blue
and perfectly clear and the wind is up...WAY up. I'd
rate it at 30-50 kph gusts. The temperature is 17
degrees Celsius, 62 Fahrenheit. I'm sitting here in
the cafe across the street from my apartment wearing
a T-shirt. It's my "Serenity" T-shirt, the one with
the logo of the Firefly class vessel of that name.
And I'm feeling pretty damned serene myself.
Having scored myself the perfect corner table at
this perfect sidewalk cafe, on the perfect people-
watching street in Sitges, it seems a perfect oppor-
tunity to write about the subject I'll already pre-
pared to write about today. :-) That is, what do the
people of Spain DO on an unseasonably warm and
sunny Sunday?
The answer is simple and characteristically Spanish.
They go out for a walk.
Not a walk TO anywhere, just a walk. It's the difference
in Spanish between the verbs caminar and pasear. The
former implies that you're walking TO somewhere; the
latter that you're just walking, taking a stroll. BIG
difference.
The quote I used as a kind of preface to Road Trip Mind
deals with this difference. It's from that master of
strolling, Lao-tzu: "A good traveler has no fixed plans,
and is not intent upon arriving."
I recently had a visitor from Santa Fe. Although he is
a nice guy and very intelligent and I really enjoyed
talking with him while he was here, walking with him
was just torture. He has this stride on him that's like
a German hiker at the Grand Canyon, intent on seeing it
ALL before sunset, and thus hiking so fast that he sees
nothing. My friend would just *dash* down the sidewalks
of Sitges, as if he were on his Way to Somewhere. I'd be
just strolling along, enjoying the scenery and the smells
and the walk itself, and he was on his Way somewhere. I'd
walk at my normal (since moving to Spain) leisurly pace,
and every so often he'd look around and notice that I was
half a block behind him and have to stop and wait for me.
I always hoped that that would help him get the message
about the nature of Spain, but it never seemed to. He was
impatient while standing there waiting for me to catch up,
too.
Goals in life are good, in that they give us a reason
to walk the pathway towards them if we need a reason.
But sometimes -- damn! -- you really don't *need* a
reason, and just feel like taking a stroll.
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