I’m not really sure why, but most of the time I do my local circular walk, I do it anticlockwise. Tonight I turned right instead of left.
It never ceases to amaze me how different changing direction can make things look. This is why I am never bothered about having to do an out and back walk, the view is always different on the way back.
[Walking in “the golden hour” and a full moon can even improve HS2 boreholes!]
The Obvious? 
Great post. Yes. I feel what you feel Euan. Your thoughts remind me of:
“Henry David Thoreau, who walked more vigorously than me on the other side of the continent, wrote of the local, “An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.”
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
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Great quote, and a book I’ve had on my reading list for too long!
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I have a few local 5K routes I have designed, but doing them in reverse requires a concious mirror step that is often ignored. It can be done, most are out and back on the same route, but some can, and should, be reversed.
On the other hand, doing my tai chi form in reverse, is going to take a lot of commitment and practice to reverse 47 forms, and probably to no martial advantage!
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And here’s me just turning right instead of left! 😉
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Last week was rather a good one for regular but customarily unengaged enjoyers of The Obvious. Here are a couple of ‘what struck me me wases’
On the turning right instead of left bit, I found a while ago that I couldn’t get on a pushbike the wrong way round – I mean in the old professor style of putting your left foot on the pedal and swinging over your right leg as you get going. Putting my right foot on the pedal and swinging my left leg over, I fell over, near enough, and realised that my balance was very bad. As I have 2 children with dyspraxia, which is a very variable complaint but one of whose fairly regular features is poor ability to transfer from left side of brain to right, I feel sure that I have passed my bicycle problem on. So the question to Mr Obvious is Did you feel uncomfortable turning right? And how ‘handed’ are you?
Second comes the observation that the commentary on idling is remarkably free of references, it’s really pretty unpopulated. I suggest 1 you read Kim, or get it on Audible for your walks. Focus on the lama. But don’t ignore Kim’s working towards things – the red bull, the great game…and how he brings to bear all he sees. Then 2 read A Guide for the Perplexed, the short work that Schumacher thought his best and delivered to his daughter 5 days before he died. It has 2 absorbable points for Obviuos purposes. . One is his experience of being taught at Columbia by a man whose map simply did not correspond to the terrain Schumacher knew, which set him on a path of being interested in people who he observed had had the same experience and set out to make their own maps. A rum list, to my mind, but interesting. Two is his commentary on Beethoven’s 5th Symphony: it isn’t a vaccuum, you have to bring something to it. He felt what he was bringing was inadequate, and set about working out how to remedy that. As in French ‘assister à’: you bring something…And then 3, apply your mind to the framework for living offered by Goethe in Faust – ‘Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen’, say the angels in the prologue in heaven. At the end, Faust has shrivelled physically but he is still striving – he has to – on a land reclamation scheme, when Goethe has to cheat in order to bring the work an end. Goethe really is one of the very few at the very top tip of the iceberg of humans. 4 Then read the Book of Job. Then please write us another Obvious entry about idling.
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All of my posts are short on references. Unsubstantiated opinion at its best. Your comment on the other hand is so replete with references that, despite reading it three times, I have no idea what your point is?
I am right handed btw.
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