[at-l] Walking Quote of the Day Plus SomeThoughts on Truth

[icw39@ncfreedom.net (Clark Wright)]

This is a good post, but I still don't like the implicit premises -
namely, (1) that it is easy to define what "walking all the white
blazes" means; and (2) that the poster "forgives" those who fail the
above definition but go ahead and apply for the 2000 miler
"certification."  Having said that, I also agree 100% with the stated
premise that too many times in society today we tend to allow more and
more people to get away from personal responsibility and honestly by
saying things like: "well, their heart was in the right place;" or
"well, they did the job 90% ok."  These competing points - the need to
adhere to a strict standard of honesty and responsibility, and the
recognition that there are multiple HONEST differences of opinion as to
what constitutes "hiking every blaze" on the AT - trouble me.  As I
noted in a prior post, it would have NEVER occurred to me that walking
NOBO into a shelter on the southern blue blazed entrance/exit trail, and
then out the next morning on the northern blue blazed entrance/exit
trail would be viewed as "not walking all the white blazes" on the AT -
yet once I came to the Silers Bald Shelter, where doing that involves
missing a good hunk of the AT itself, and another shelter like that near
Damascus, then I began to see the other point.  But then you get down to
fairly ridiculous things like which side of the car did you enter/exit
on when hitching in/out of a town [thus maybe forgetting to traverse
100% of the width of the road pavement, which is part of the AT at that
crossing] - yet I found myself starting to fixate on that, too . . . but
as you learn more and more of these things while walking along, then you
can end up beset by ridiculous internal passion plays on whether you
need to go back and re-do that road crossing back in GA where you were
not yet contaminated by this issue, and thus have no idea whether you
got out of the car on the north side of the road, and thus failed to
walk the width of the road there, or whether you might have taken an
exit path from a shelter right on the trail that resulted in you missing
40 feet of AT Trail.

My point is simple:  It's not that simple to be 100% honest and true to
yourself, because I don't care what they say, and how much they protest
to the contrary, even the purest of the pure did NOY walk every
centimeter of the AT - somewhere, they stepped outside the worn trail
path, or on some rocky part, or high on some totally rocky ridge on a
foggy day, they wandered a foot or two "off path" - just as all of us
humans did.  And thus, in the end, I come back to my religious analogy,
which is right appropriate as we approach this Easter weekend:  Jesus
came to forgive us ALL for our sins, and relative to him and God, we are
all equally far down in the gutter of sin - so does it really make sense
to expend huge amounts of energy parsing out relative rules re defining
what "pure" is as to the AT when NONE of us can measure up to a true,
literal definition of "purity?"  I, for one, respect Saunterer's basic
point re the need for honestly and self-responsibility, but I reject the
implicit premise that any of us mortals can define AT hike purity, and
thus in the end I deplore all the efforts to define and parse it out,
for they lead to too much rancor, unnecessary guilt, second-guessing by
hikers en-route, etc.

Lets use Easter as a trigger point for easing off on the purity debate,
and focusing on the wonderful feeling that comes from not bothering to
judge others on such an irrelevant issue, but instead, perhaps spend
more time talking about the things we all have in common, such as a
wonderous view of nature, and the crazy desire to long distance hike! :)

Hike on,

thru-thinker

saunterer@jimbullard.org wrote:
> 
> I'll get to the quote of the day but first I want to think out loud about
> some of the discussion that has been going on.  I think it's fair to say
> that most of us really don't care how each other chooses to hike the trail
> but there is some difference of opinion over whether one should claim 2000
> miler status if he/she hasn't hiked past every white blaze.
> 
> On tonight's network news there were three consecutive stories that dealt
> with truth.  First was the on-going story of sexual abuse by priests and
> the Catholic church's reluctance to reveal the extent of the problem.  Then
> there was a story about the broker who saw the Enron problem coming,
> advised some customers to sell and got fired for it because his brokerage
> was still backing Enron.  The third was about how millions of our richest
> citizens are sending their money to secret off-shore bank accounts to avoid
> paying taxes.  All these involve untruths that hurt other people.  Every
> one of them can rationalize their untruth.
> 
> Like OB, I'm sure that everyone lies about something, sometime, if only to
> themselves.  I've lied more than once in my life, both to myself and
> others.  Some I regret, some lies I'm glad I told.  Sometimes the truth
> hurts and if it's unnecessary, I choose not to hurt people I care
> about.  On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd rate signing that ATC form if one hadn't
> actually passed every white blaze at 1.  Should the person who does it feel
> guilty?  Maybe, I don't know.  I do know there are a lot bigger lies to
> worry about and I don't subscribe the domino theory that got us into the
> Vietnam War.  If we attach too much importance to something as small as a
> certificate for completing a voluntary activity that qualifies you for
> nothing (your certificate and $2 will buy you a coffee at Starbucks) we are
> losing our perspective.  Anyway, that's how I see it.
> 
> Getting to the walking quote of the day I offer the following excerpt from
> WALKING by *the man* hisself, Henry David Thoreau.  It's the very passage
> that inspired my chosen trail name and in it's own way talks about truth . . .
> 
> "I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
> understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a genius,
> so to speak, for sauntering:  which word is beautifully derived 'from idle
> people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked for
> charity, under pretense of going a' la Sainte Terrer,' to the Holy Land,
> till children exclaimed, 'there goes a Sainte Terrer,' a saunterer, a Holy
> Lander.  They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they
> pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are
> saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. . . ."
> 
> Whether or not I pass every white blaze I hope that I will manage to earn
> my trail name in the sense that HDT used it.  As for those who are "mere
> idlers", well, my mother (a Methodist minister) taught me that charity
> never hurts the giver, even when it is undeserved.
> 
> sAunTerer
> 
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