Drowning in a Glass Half Empty Essay -- Personal Narrative Hiking Essa

Drowning in a Glass Half Empty Wearily walking into the lobby of my residence hall, a group of my classmates gathered to embark on a pilgrimage through Poly Canyon. We meandered over to our rendezvous with our professor on a gravel road sided by a grove of eucalyptus trees rising up like a rib cage. I doubted that this was going to be anything like what Henry David Thoreau intended in his essay â€Å"Walking,† when he described walking as being â€Å"absolutely free from all worldly engagements.† If one frees oneself from worldly engagements, one may journey into mindfulness, a state of total awareness of being. We had a guide, we were a class, and we brought with us society. I carried a backpack with pen and paper, a sweatshirt, and cynicism heavier than the fog we drudged through. Campus housing structures disappeared behind us, and we were on a road winding around hills. I observed sprinklers watering dead grass, telephone wires cutting through trees, and a dumpster full of waste, worsened by a car passing through our ensemble. We had a ways to go before we could get away from civilization. My pessimism deepened as I listened to my classmates chatter in awe about deer on the hillside and heard our professor mention a toxic waste controversy. One deer stood majestically atop the hill, its dark, shadowy outline nearly transparent in the dense fog, while two others eyed us with less interest than we eyed them. I had seen more deer on a public golf course the day before. One of my classmates began her narrative aloud, adding to the worldly engagements I wished to remove myself from. Moving on, I passed under a stone arch onto a trail where I sat and wrote down my thoughts; drawing ... ...each, looking out to sea. Birds chirped, cows mooed, cameras clicked, and an oddly calming and reassuring white noise of car traffic were all audible. I was alone. In the end, my cynicism is fog. I couldn’t have enjoyed the walk as much as I did without overcoming my negativity; moreover, I couldn’t have appreciated the beauty of the fog without walking above it, to look upon it in its entirety. I sauntered, walking towards a holy land. I gained mindfulness through looking at the bowl of milk that was Poly Canyon submerged in fog, focusing on every breath and each step upon ancient rock, feeling the dew from bunch grass cool the pokes of yucca bush, and traveling to a new place in body and spirit. I undertook a pilgrimage despite fighting it the best I could. Walking gradually beat my cynicism, as the morning sun slowly withered away the fog.