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Writer's pictureCrone

What distances

What paths we've walked, me and the dog, since this all began. The seasons changing and the miles clocking up. From the scent of May blossoms to the rich yeasty smell of ripening corn. Wind and rain and days of searing heat. Sometimes I'd come home, take off gloves and muddy boots, see my fingers blue with cold. Last week, the dog got sunstroke and had to stay in the house the following day.


10,000 steps set as the minimum. Don't always make it on running days. Time outside during the shuttest part of shutdown, so precious. The air like a purification. The countryside a blessing.


The first day I drove out to run - the tension of it! Fear of being stopped, told off. The first day I went back to Hanging Houghton and wept at the view of those familiar fields.


This landscape, it's my home now, but not my home. That's Dartmoor and the sense of presence. Wittgenstein says something fitting - that it's not how the world is that's mystical, but that the world is. You feel that on the Moors. The aliveness of landscape in its sleeping, waiting, raw majesty. Dartmoor is understated - not sublime like Alpine scenes - and not pretty in any chocolate box way. No, nor beautiful neither.*


See, this is where I somewhat part company with Murdoch, who does believe that the Good, of which the Beautiful is an apt image, has some transcendent reality. I don't know that I feel a presence of the Good to which I am always striving. That's not to say I don't value the Good. It's not to say I don't accept that value is embedded in how we perceive the world. But for me what is transcendent is the being-ness of it all. Just existence. Ah, maybe love comes into this. I do love, yes. I do love the fact that there is existence rather than not (mind, I have felt the desire personally not to exist, but that's on an egoic level). And how could one not love that? That there are stars and planets, this blue earth and all its animals, vegetables and minerals. With existence comes decay. It is in time; it is growing and aging and dying. And it is all as finite for me as it may be, or may not be, infinite in its entirety. But much of what exists will cease to exist and that which replaces it will not be identical with it. One does not say, if a child dies, 'You can have another.' Well, one may and it is true, but that which is lost, is uniquely lost.


Here too I have found myself struggling with the future generations factor. In numerical terms, according to Toby Ord in The Precipice - he was recently interviewed by Sam Harris - listen and you'll get what I mean in my comments about strict utilitarians in the post on anger, Past, present, future, they represent, in mathematical terms, the largest required focus for our moral striving. And I do both appreciate the claim and feel a sense of duty. it is, in my moral mattering map, of importance not to destroy their chances of flourishing.


However, they do not exist. Their existence is hypothetical. To the extent that my actions make their when more of an if, I am doing wrong, I agree. And yet, the plight of those existing, of what exists, draws my love - my valuing - like a magnet. Here maths and value are in conflict.


And value too plays out in the quality of existence rather than the quantity. I would prefer a shorter life with a larger percentage of it engaged in that deep perception of and attention to the fabric of being. The objects of the world. The other beings of the world. The ideas arising from the being and the seeing and the thinking of the world.


Walk these paths noticing the smells and the colours; feeling the changing texture of the earth and the uneven footing; sensing the seasons changing and the daylight hours extending and now shortening. Walk these paths always in company with the world. You are never existing alone.


NOTE


*Sara Maitland finds similar pleasure in the Scottish moors where she lives and in this article offers a better description. She also addresses the concept of the Good. It's well worth reading!

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