I headed onward into the day and suddenly smelled the ocean for the very first time (with 25km still to go before I could arrive at the coast proper). Then a short time thereafter, the same came into view – a sight that filled me with an odd & overwhelming mix of thoughts & emotions: joy and gratitude and peace and jubilation, yes, and yet also nostalgia and disbelief and doubt as well …

“Any ray of light – just like any traveling Soul – has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can engage a direction and begin moving along the same. This is an oversimplification of Fermat’s Principle – a theory that sounds weird from any angle, because it essentially describes light’s behavior in goal-oriented terms, as though God gives every light beam the commandment that ‘Thou shalt simultaneously minimize & maximize the time taken to reach your desired endpoints.’ And the even weirder thing is – Love essentially operates in the very same way; for a time taking seemingly two steps back for every once step forward, until it realizes that there is no real distance between its Giver and its Beloved – until it simply stops striving at all to ‘get there’ and then turns about face and heads all the way around backwards to then easily arrive at exactly the place it had originally dreamed of going. To phrase it all another way: Love takes a seeming eternity to choose how & to whom it will travel, and yet instantly arrives there once that choice is finally made.” ~ inspired by Ted Chiang & Bryant McGill

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt