I walk a lot. Walking is a time to ignore tech or have a mental conversation with yourself or even to get some time with no distractions. As I walk, my mind wanders and sometimes it results in a column that covers a lot of ground….this is one of those columns.
When you walk the streets of older neighborhoods in College Heights, Lemont, Boalsburg or Bellefonte, one of the things you notice that is vastly different from modern neighborhoods is the presence of back alleys.
Some of these alleys are paved, some are gravel, some have names, some don’t. No matter, they are small passages taking you to a more connected time and place.
There’s something about alleys that give a place a grittier more human vibe. Whether it is in the older colonial cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston or on a small island like Bermuda.
In a time when speed of movement, both physically and technologically, is valued above all else, the act of walking and wandering and allowing yourself to roam can be healthy physically and mentally.
Walking around campus and the Borough neighborhoods this time of year brings back a lot of memories.
The College Heights School has long been closed but there was a playground behind it. Voices of kids on swings, on jungle gyms or running around the field used to fill the air.
Outside the Pavilion Theater on campus the covered patio is gone, a place where families would sit eating ice cream cones from the Creamery, which used to be across the street.
The fountain behind the Forum Building is gone. As kids we rode bikes around that fountain; as mischievous high school kids we poured a box of Tide detergent in it to witness a tsunami of suds. And perhaps as college kids there may have been a time when a Honda was driven around that fountain.
These are the thoughts and memories that can be triggered walking the alleys and back sidewalks.
In an era where people rely more and more on AI to write and communicate, these types of memories are harder to summon. AI can’t walk the streets and remember the place where you first met a serious girlfriend, or a best friend. It cannot even begin to understand the passion that comes in identifying with a life of memories that builds as we get older.
As technology increasingly dominates, the alleyways, the back streets of life become less and less of a part of shared experiences.
In an era where some find it more important to post pictures during the moment, rather than to simply be in it, memory’s true imprint on the mind suffers. For the generation that lost a physical interconnectedness to Zoom meetings, technology, a pandemic and riding swiftly from place to place on motorized scooters, will they ever have that same grounded sense of place that is so vital to our humanity?
Having a phone gives you directions…does that mean we look at our surroundings less as we travel? Does it mean that without plotting our course on a map we fail to grasp how places fit together?
There is a joy in getting lost from time to time, a joy in taking the long way, the back way, the scenic route. A joy known these days only to the wanderer willing to figure something out by themselves.
If we are fortunate to live long enough, we reach a point where you know you’re much closer statistically to the end of life than the start of it. I am someone who has accepted the fleeing of my youth.
There is a great line in the movie “Parthenope” by the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino. The main character, a beautiful young woman, asks an older man if she may join him, to which he replies “No….because I don’t want to steal one minute of your youth from you.”
With age comes wisdom born of both success and failure. But with wisdom comes the understanding that your time was different, and that the current generation must figure their way forward amid the realities of their time.
And we must grant them that latitude.
As someone who is getting older, the walks around these familiar places day by day become ever more meaningful because we don’t know how many more days we have left.
And it is pointless to rail against what is by comparing it to what was. The present is but a temporary moment between what will be and what has been.
What is of concern is the narrowing horizon of historical reference. The constant buzz of what’s next makes us forget what happened 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. We’re also living in an era where many, both young and old, would prefer that we suppress the darker parts of history’s important lessons. Some of it is intentional, a pathway to using history’s sinister lessons to exploit others as has been done before.
Consequently, we walk into the same mistakes recorded across the eras of human history.
There is an ebb and flow. Society fights through adversity and after a decade or more of good times we forget.
Machiavelli wrote in “The Prince,” “For never having reflected during tranquil times that there might come a change (and it is human nature when the sea is calm not to think of storms), when adversity overtook them, they thought not of defence but only of escape.”
Human nature has always been dominated by recency bias. It often lends itself to carelessness by people of wealth and power. F Scott Fitzgerald captured this perfectly in “The Great Gatsby” in the characters of Daisy and Tom Buchanan:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
As I walk through alleys and fields of memory, I look at things that were built with an enduring quality that remain solid in their construction. Nature is no different. At our old bus stop, the buckeye tree in that yard now towers at perhaps three times the height it stood decades ago.
I’m reminded that these things existed before me, and much of what I see will exist after me. On the desk is a clock that audibly ticks each second away. That noise reminds that time marches on and no amassing of ego or wealth or power will matter when our time comes.
And it reminds us that what we value, what we believe in and what we should be doing is thinking about those basic connections that we find on a human scale. We find that walking alleys, not streets, walking a campus filled with memories and walking through playgrounds and places that had tremendous meaning for us in our lives.
We find that scale with a smile and greeting to a passerby. We ground the foundations of life thinking about the people whose lives, intersecting with ours, provided selfless moments impacting us in slight ways, but endure even still.
