For years now I’ve been visiting an outlook on the Appalachian Trail. The Trail passes near our house. The trek to the outlook is about twenty minutes each way. The view is east over a valley of cultivated fields and native woods, bordered by smooth worn hills. Man is in evidence – as farmer, road-layer, builder of houses – but still as a respecter of nature, not its eraser. Carrion-seeking vultures glide with unfathomable grace. I sit for a spell on a glacier-deposited boulder I whimsically designate my secret throne. Grandson Riley corrected me, when I brought him here, this boulder was neither a throne nor secret nor mine. I like to imagine a Native American youth squatting here gazing, before the white man. Sometimes enthroned I scribble impressions into my pocket journal. The beauty, quiet, and solitude are conducive to musing.

            Henry’s zeal for long walks has made me a more frequent visitor. I needed to get a dog to walk me. Before Henry, if the weather was too cold, wet, hot, buggy or name your excuse, I found it easier to keep indoors. Henry will hear none of this. Unexercised he fidgets, yips, nips, and otherwise scatters concentration. Why get a dog, his agitation suggests, if you didn’t mean to work him – vigorously – not just with a short hike to the mailbox or to void? Henry’s never a pain precisely, but he can be a pest, especially with justice on his side.

            This fine late autumn morning, enthroned, a thought surprised me which felt new. Might I, I wondered, in Monet’s manner, repaint this view repeatedly, en plein air, to reflect the changes – of weather, foliage, moment, watcher, light? The subject, as with Monet’s haystack, cathedral, bridge or garden, would be the same but the view always different. That’s the implicit moral of such an exercise: look with fresh eyes and the scene is fresh. Clouds, leaves, grasses, mosses, dirt, the mood of the viewer everything alters always, lavishing us with a cornucopia of realizations, if we take the time. The beauty of the world is up to us.

            This moral rebukes America’s religion for the last several centuries. The advantages of materialism have been manifold. Avidity for more stirred us to invention, discovery. The carrot kept the donkey trotting. Getting got us going.

            The disadvantage has been dissatisfaction, the besmirching of now by a more splendid morrow. With so many temptations dangling, who can be happy where we are? Better awaits – that is materialism’s taunting promise. And it is false.

            The discipline of such a series of views – the same and always different – would be seeing. That has been the thrill of my post-harness years: learning to see. Work-lives require blinders: keep your eye on the prize: ignore distractions: focus! How often did I urge this on teammates. “Single-minded” was a term of praise, not scorn.

            These days my mind’s as open as my boulder to any weather. But this activity of seeing, while available, joyous, and free, is not as easy as one might suppose. One must learn, first, to be still, which is hard for a go-getting American. When a pool’s water jostles, one can see nothing into its depths.

Then one must shrink oneself into nobody, so one sees what is and not what’s weighing on your mind. Nobody, in American, means loser.

Finally, one must be unafraid, for new truths often disrupt our complacencies. Most of what I’ve learned in recent years has been the opposite of what I was taught. This is disquieting. Who am I, if not what I’ve always known?