Rain-Walking

This is #33 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.

Great Blue Heron; my own photo. I took this shot several years ago on Bowen Island; it’s not the heron I saw today, as I was camera-less on today’s walk.

Most of the people I see, today, as I wander about in the rain, are in a hurry. There is not much being said, and most of the rain-walkers are solo. I walk for an hour, bundled up, umbrella in hand, trying to just observe, to pay attention, and to do so without trying to ‘make sense’ of what I see and hear and smell and feel. Without trying to ‘think about’ what is being seen and heard and smelled and felt. This is very hard for a human to do. Especially one like me, obsessed with making sense of everything.

I have long described myself as a hedonist — someone who believes that our behaviour is driven by an innate tendency to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. But I’m neither a ‘psychological hedonist’ (since I don’t believe our behaviours are ‘motivated’ by our beliefs) nor an ‘ethical hedonist’ (because without free will, the idea that our behaviour is influenced by what we think we ‘should’ do, seems preposterous).

Instead, I’ve come to accept, at least for now, that our behaviour is completely conditioned, and that the ‘vehicle’ of that conditioning is that, through chemical inducements in the body, it increases feelings of pleasure and decreases feelings of pain. Hence, I eat some things and not others, I do some things and not others, I say some things (like the things I say on this blog) and not others. Those chemical inducements are not the ‘reasons’ for my behaviours. The reasoning is merely an after-the-fact rationalization, an explanation (etym.: ‘a spreading out’). And like any explanation, such as the one that was held for centuries about how the sun revolved around the earth, it is only tentative. And, like any explanation, it doesn’t matter. It changes nothing.

But it can bring a kind of ‘aha!’ pleasure. And that, perhaps, ‘explains’ why we are compelled to seek explanations. We want to know, plausibly, how and why things are. Each ‘aha’ brings with it a little dopamine rush. It brings us pleasure to think we might know. Even if there need not be a how or why. Even if there is no how or why.

What is clear as I walk is that most of the rain-walkers do not find the rain pleasurable. It is cold, damp and uncomfortable. It obscures our vision and can make walking and driving treacherous. Most of the people I see walking have been conditioned to do the things they are apparently doing despite the unpleasantness of the rain they must face to do them. At the moment, that would appear to be mostly shopping — buying things with the anticipation they will make themselves and others happier (ie they will bring them pleasure, or reduce their pain). It doesn’t matter if those things will actually increase pleasure or reduce pain. It doesn’t even matter whether or how or why they believe those things will increase (future) pleasure or reduce (future) pain. They have been conditioned to act as they do regardless.

They have no choice but to put up with the current unpleasantness of the rain in anticipation of the perceived future pleasure or reduced future pain that their hurried purchases will enable. When they hear their loved one say “we are out of Tylenol”, the chemicals of conditioning automatically spur the rush to the pharmacy, despite the rain. There is no choice involved. Even the apparent choice of what to wear and which pharmacy to go to is entirely conditioned.

So now, as I wander in the rain, protected by my attire (thanks to my conditioning) from the unpleasantness of the rain’s cold and dampness, I am trying to pay attention and see everything through this all-behaviour-is-purely-conditioned lens: There is no agency, no meaning, no ‘matter’ to the behaviours I witness, so there is no point thinking about those things, ‘making meaning’ where there need be none. Instead, I try to just witness, observe, what is apparently happening, without judgement or interpretation or sense-making. I try to take “mental pictures” without any accompanying explanatory text or captions of what is seen.

So:

As I walk down by the creek, the birds, which have been chirping cheerfully, suddenly grow quiet. I smell the petrichor — the scent the soil emits in the rain. The smell evokes certain memories, bitter-sweet, and prompts me to inhale deeply, and to smile.

A few moments later, I come upon a group of three men, of very different ages, with grizzled, stubbled faces. They are sitting on inverted white plastic pails, talking quietly, and smoking. They are partly sheltered from the rain by the trees surrounding the creek. One of them smiles, but it is a guarded smile. He is missing a lot of his teeth. I nod and smile back as I pass them. One of them says quietly, in an accent I cannot place: “Peace be on you”.

Further along the trail there’s a very handsome, fluffy orange and white cat sitting on one of the posts of a fence that separates a luxury condo building from the creek path. It watches me as I approach, and as I cautiously reach up to stroke it, it nudges its head up against my hand to encourage me. As I continue to skritch its head and neck, it deftly turns around on the fencepost. It then looks at me. I repeat the skritches. The cat continues to look at me. As I wave goodbye to it, to continue on my way, I notice at the foot of the fencepost an empty can of tuna, its lid peeled back.

A couple of minutes after that I see a great blue heron fishing in the creek. It is so still I almost walk right by it. If there is a model of attentiveness, the great blue is probably it. It moves as subtly and deliberately as a ninja. I sense its awareness of me, its readiness to flee if I stray off the manicured path. I give it as wide a berth as I can, and move as stealthily as this uncoordinated body can manage.

At this point I leave the lovely, sodden creekside trail park and cross over the busy street to the city centre lake and park. There is a multicultural festival taking place in the park today. The vendors of foods and crafts and the bandshell presenters seem completely unfazed by the rain and the very small, rain-drenched ‘crowds’. All I see are smiles and nods, and expressions of equanimity. I am drawn to a display and demonstration of Chinese hanfu costumes. Three women are wearing, and describing, three different styles of hanfu. The graceful movements of one of the women in particular are captivating. Every move of her hands, her head, and the huge fan that she effortlessly spreads and slides around her seems at once completely intuitive and painstakingly practiced. Her movements remind me of the moves of qi gong — the precision, the smoothness, like a gentle, constrained dance.

Like the movements of the heron I witnessed just moments earlier.

I wander over toward the bandshell. There is a woman speaking and singing in Korean (I can tell by the lilt), accompanied by flute and piano players, but the music is clearly western in style, and it’s definitely not K-Pop. It sounds more like the kind of hymn you’d hear in a western church. It seems an incongruous performance, but their small audience seems to enjoy it.

At the lake, I stop (as usual) to watch and listen to the ducks. The famous expression about rainy days being “nice weather for ducks” seems to be true, as the ducks don’t seem to be perturbed at all by the light rain, especially today as it’s not windy. I wrote about their remarkable waterproofing in a previous post. (The oil that helps waterproof the ducks’ feathers is found on their tail feathers; with herons this oil is secreted by the thin white ‘beard’ feathers you see in the photo above, on its front; a key purpose of waterbirds’ constant preening is to distribute this oil to their other feathers for waterproofing.)

As I’ve observed in past, the ducks sleep in a cluster, with those on the outside keeping their ‘outside’ eye (and the related part of the brain) open and awake, while those on the inside of the cluster have both eyes closed. Today, however, quite a few of the ducks are awake, rooting in the grass beside the lake.

Several of the ducks are doing something I’ve never observed before — they are tilting their head as if they were giving someone (perhaps me) the ‘evil eye’. I catch myself shrugging at them, ‘apologetically’: “What did I do?”.

One of the ducks is also repeatedly, and comically, blowing bubbles under the water, another behaviour I’ve never observed before.

In the corner of the park, a mother and her young daughter are sitting on a bench watching the fountain. They have Asian features and very dark complexions. Suddenly the little girl stands, turns to face the bench, and kicks up into a handstand position on the bench, her legs flexing. I raise my eyebrows, but the mother seems nonchalant about this. The two of them are chatting quietly, but I have no idea what they’re saying. And then the little girl slowly raises her left arm and grasps her mother’s wrist. I almost bump into another rain-walker as I watch this. Very carefully, the girl, who can’t be much older than kindergarten age, releases her grip on her mother’s wrist and balances on the bench by one hand alone. Then she adjusts her balance, returns to a two-handed handstand, eases her legs over her head, and then quickly places her feet on the top of the bench’s back, pushes her arms up, and propels herself over the bench’s back, landing, unsteadily, back on the ground. She runs back around to the front of the bench, apparently to try it again, but her mother motions her to sit, and points to the fountain.

I listen to my breath as I leave the park, headed back towards home. My breathing is slower, deeper than it normally is, despite the fairly quick pace I am moving at. I am no longer ‘fighting’ — resisting — the cold and dampness of the rain, its little stings on my exposed skin. There is, briefly, an eerie sense of kind of ‘melting into the rest of the world’. It’s as if my heart rate is slowing, and as if my ears are tuning into things they haven’t discerned before, or, rather, listening in a way they haven’t before. And yet there is a familiarity, a je ne sais quoi to it. There is a ‘brightness’ to everything I can’t describe. But it only lasts a moment. For a second, I was home. And now, I’m back.

Outside the café, seemingly oblivious to the rain, a couple sits drinking coffees, while a big shaggy dog lies curled around the legs of its people, and around the legs of the table. As I near the café, a much smaller dog, taking its people for a walk, wags its tail furiously as it races over to meet the huge dog, which also begins to wag its tail, almost lifting the table off the ground in the process. The humans quickly apologize to each other for the dogs’ behaviour. The big dog resettles under the table, sighing. The little dog keeps looking back, almost tripping over its leash as it does so.

And then I shake off my umbrella, and am cocooned into the warm interior of the café. My friend the barista has his playlist on over the café speakers, and I wave to him and start to sing along. I look around the room, pick out an empty table, and wonder: What are all these people doing here? What forces conspired to bring them all here, to this place, now?

And I smile, knowing there need not be any explanation, that even the explanation of ‘conditioning’ is just a story. This story has been going on, its strange, unwieldy, uncertain plot written, the lines given to the innumerable actors just in time to be delivered, for seemingly billions of years. It’s all just apparently happening, and this body I presume to inhabit just has a bit part in it. I feel something like gratefulness for it all, but gratefulness isn’t quite the right word. A slight frisson ripples through ‘my’ body.

Oh, excuse me, I’m being hailed. I’m on. Yes, I’m here. Salut! Salam! Nî hâo! Annyeong! Kon’nichiwa! Nice to see you!