Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 3

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Day 3 - Shoes and Paths

I spent the warm middle of this day hiking upstream along the West Fork of the Gila River. Wearing sandals, I forded numerous rocky river crossings, back and forth for several miles to where the valley sides became sheer cliffs that embraced me. Had my feet been bare I would have been stuck at home, staring at pine needles. Had there not been a trail I would have needed to hack my way through brambles of willows at each crossing. Shoes and paths: these are appropriate metaphors for how our society provides us with the means to smooth the courses we might choose to travel in life.

Paths are offered on a variety of scales. Feel a bit bored in the evening? Watch a video and let your mind be swept along for a couple hours, like bubbles on a stream. When you sit down with friends at a restaurant you walk a ritual path, in which everyone chats, looks at menus, decides on the orders, and then is served in a well-established sequence of dishes. Coffee or dessert at the end?

Longer pre-planned (and also almost ritualized) flows are found in semester-long college classes, and guided flows of even longer duration are found throughout many career paths. From learning to eat as infants and then moving on to the year of kindergarten and eventually to the trajectory of adult life toward our funeral, our inner primal mesh is to a nontrivial extent propelled into forward motion along social arrows that shape daily experience and the trajectory of psychological development.

To travel these various psychological and developmental paths requires more than floating along like a bubble on a stream. We have need of shoes, which are the mental skills that allow us to walk particular paths.

On a real hike, I put on physical shoes and then walk the trail. But for many social paths, being on an outer path of engagement with society teaches you the inner skills that are the metaphoric shoes that allow you to walk the future portions of the combination outer and inner path. These inner shoes can be as simple as conversation skills to enter the flow of shared speech. But to become a skilled surgeon, welder, teacher, or parent requires concerted and directed effort to fortify one’s capacities to travel each next stage. And just as real footwear shields us from painful rocks, the socially-gained footwear often protects us as we travel. And we gain rewards, such as money and community. It’s clearly important to choose shoes that fit in all such cases.

Yes, we seem to choose footwear and paths. Some of us prefer paths that are mobbed like a crowded interstate highway. Others want freelance occupations, the equivalent of taking obscure or non-existent paths in the woods. Having trouble moving along in life? Make a plan and fasten on some footwear and replace as necessary as you progress. The world is a shoe store for your mind and is full of paths. As the ad that sells the engineered piece of “footwear” called the Volkswagen car teaches, “Life is a journey.”

We might want to contemplate of the seduction of these abundant social aids of shoes and paths. The ways they offer to escape inner entanglement of mental meshes are so easy and soothing that it is difficult to say “no” to them. We become hooked—financially, of course, but we’re speaking psychologically—to having footwear and paths. From the ultimately trivial time spent coupled to a ride on a video to what are often serious decades of devotion to an institution’s goals of economic success, the trouble with many social shoes and paths is that the sacred self, the inner core of the individual, can get buried. The self-perpetuating nature of the social paths can engulf one in directions that are its, not yours.

The good news is that we can say that it is up to each human being as an individual to do the walking. We can delight in the fact that we seem to choose the social arrows we ride. We often feel we do indeed choose. But from where do the choices come?

We could be fooling ourselves into thinking we are freely choosing when actually we make many choices on the basis of being soothed into something that is easy. Indeed, paths in the social world are expressly designed to coax us into joining them. Many of our choices are derived from deep biological urges and the urge to satisfy those urges. Our psychological self is often put into service for satisfying these impulses at various scales (again, urges to satisfy urges). We could be programmed into telling ourselves that we are, in fact, freely choosing.

Is it not possible that the felt sense that I am primarily my own self during an action of choice is itself another piece of footwear I’ve fastened to myself, mostly unconsciously, so that the felt sense of choice helps move me along in life, along with its positives (e.g., personal progress) and negatives (e.g., constraints on exploring)?

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