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(CNN) — Some have a place to pray. I have a designated space to think. You can pray or meditate anywhere, but some places are conducive to going deeper by design or nature.
My secular cathedral is San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, on the west end of the city, beyond Golden Gate Park, overlooking the sea and sky and accessible by the terminus of the city’s MUNI light rail line.
There I returned regularly to sort myself out, practice some philosophy, and absorb the meaning of life. It’s how I made up my mind that I was able to walk this vast, three-and-a-half-mile stretch of nature.
Just as churches, synagogues, and mosques are built to encourage worship, fellowship, and communion with community and God, so too are natural spaces that focus the mind and create an experience of wonder. In places like this, there’s something mysterious about how you receive light, or how you change your point of reference, or how they surround you with a heightened sense of beauty.
What started out as a New Year’s event to watch the sunset once a month when I lived in San Francisco turned into a ritual, and now that I don’t live there, it’s turned into a pilgrimage.
My personal tradition begins at the Java Beach Coffee Shop across the Great Highway from the water. I enjoy coffee and pastries as I write in my journal until I watch the sun sink below the dunes, and I head down the road and find a balcony in the sand.
According to famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, watching the sun melt into the Pacific Ocean is a guaranteed high experience.
Such perfect moments dissolve the thin line between the self and the experienced until it exists only in its own experience. For a short time, I have no one to watch the sunset but the sunset. And once I break free from the revue, I begin my mental journey.
Walking meditation
Thinking and walking, as a pair of consciousnesses, have their roots in ancient Greece and the sophists who wandered and taught in the burgeoning marketplace of ideas. Aristotle’s school of Peripatetic philosophers is named after the colonnade, or foot (peripatos), which is a prominent feature of the university.
San Francisco’s Ocean Beach sunset view from Sutro Heights
Pedro Freitas/iStockphoto/Getty Images
The names of thinkers who have set out to “move” their minds are read as canon known to every philosopher — I once was.
Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein went to think. Thomas Hobbes’s walking stick contains an inkwell for quick note-taking. Søren Kierkegaard wrote about Copenhagen’s Philosopher’s Way, Georg Hegel traversed Heidelberg philosophy, and Immanuel Kant traversed his daily commute through Königsberg. Philosopher’s Dam.
In Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A Walking Story” — a book I read while taking a series of walks through Central Park, years after I started the Ocean Beach tradition — the author writes on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.” Rasool (s.
“I have never thought so much of all the journeys I have made alone and on foot,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Confessions.” “There’s something about walking that stimulates and invigorates my mind… My body needs to be in motion to set my mind.” Rousseau (s.
For my next Ocean Beach walk, when I visit my old home, I’ll already decide on a topic. Sometimes it’s like, “Can people make themselves happy just by deciding to be happy?” or “Is religion above morality and order?”
But I often struggle with questions about how I should live my life. The most life-changing decision I made on that beach was to go to Bangkok to visit my girlfriend in a few months and ask her if she was heading to a fellowship. I decided I had to and I did. She said yes and we have been married for 19 years now. During my recent visit, I made a decision regarding our teenage daughter.
Latin phrase Walking will solve it, summed it up nicely when he said, “Many things are solved by walking.” There is an Eskimo custom, for example, where they walk away from anger until the emotion is over. Then mark the spot before walking back, a physical expression of the feeling. I know the therapeutic power of this kind of walking.
San Francisco’s Ocean Beach is rarely crowded.
Jason Doiy/E+/Getty Images
This should be the place
But for me, it’s not just a walk. It’s the place. From the Cliff House on the north end to the San Francisco Zoo, the time-abandoned Ocean Beach is perfect for this secular religious practice.
At dusk, the sky is an upside-down dream in the water’s reflection. Add the eternal waves, the scorching wind and the restlessness of my footsteps and it’s like walking through a Zen Beat poem. Sometimes I lose my thoughts in a sea of gray or a big cloud, but I stay, I keep walking until I reach some conclusion or decision.
Because San Francisco’s weather is consistently fall or cold, Ocean Beach is never crowded. Except for surfers in 7-millimeter-thick wetsuits, few venture above their ankles into the freezing water. In between, lie long stretches where people walk their dogs and the occasional runner, you hardly hear anyone but a sandpiper too busy to follow you.
There are occasional sunset watchers, couples cuddled up in Indian blankets and neo-hippies preparing bonfires. Tall dunes separate the beach from the commercial-free boardwalk and highway traffic.
In recent years, the dunes have gradually conquered the road, closing a large part to cars. And at the edge of Golden Gate Park, there’s a wild tangle of Monterey cypress and other trees framed by two windmill ruins. You don’t seem to be in town.
Perhaps the nascent and pretentious, science of psychogeography offers an explanation for how this place can affect me in other places. Where the continent meets the sea is the end of the earth and the beginning of a new adventure, the metaphorical edge before the leap, a straight line in the sand.
Under the big sky and in the wonderful weather, everything seems possible and imaginable in this place, and others like it. Travel reminds us to be humble and grateful as it reveals places that speak to us emphatically and change us for the better by walking through them.
Top Image: Sunset at Ocean Beach, San Francisco (Jonathan Clark/Moment Open/Getty Images)
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