The way I used to do it, feeling this way, was head to the roller or ice skating rink. Three hours of intense circling could do the job. Balanced on steel (ball bearings or blades), pop music roaring like gales in my ears, rushing ever forward, I could forget Jack’s aneurysm; Tom's amyloidosis; my mother’s vacant stare from a wheelchair at Otterbein Home; my failures in fatherhood, marriage, and comportment.
All the losses and worries would race away in the control required to stay balanced and moving. I might sway and slow but seldom stopped, fell, or collided with anyone, averting people blurred by speed and concentration, achieving rhythms that felt like grace, the way I'd like to be while dancing. Breaking halfway through the session, sucking fresh air, I knew no purpose other than that insane rush after nothing, like a dog chasing its tail. In self-induced exhaustion near the end, I would imagine myself in orbit around a core of meaning. But the compelling center was unknown and unmarked, nothing special to look at, and I'd laugh aloud, looking above to see the tiny lights in the black ceiling skid past like stars.
Today, the world seems to be whatever happens to me. I can plan and choose and behave, but forces beyond my control and knowledge dictate the outcome. Many of these forces are external, but some are also internal. I create achievement at most partially. Surfing on the waves of being requires balance as skating does.
Today I continue, my skating habit having evolved into walking as fast as I can through whatever it is that surrounds me. The garage sale is on my six-mile route, the first of two planned stops (the other is when my prostrate's sirens lure me into a stinking port-a-john in Hills and Dales Park, three miles farther). Needing access to restrooms limits my choice of routes. H&D, the park, is a narrow strip of green that includes a mile-long tubular valley with steep hillsides.