mobile focus

Some people walk with both eyes focused on their goal: the highest mountain peak in the range, the fifty-mile marker, the finish line. They stay motivated by anticipating the end of the journey. Since I tend to be easily distracted, I travel somewhat differently — one step at a time, with many pauses in between. Occasionally the pauses become full stops that can last anywhere from two minutes to ten hours. More often they’re less definite. … Trapped by our concepts and languages and the utter predictability of our five senses, we often forget to wonder what we’re missing as we hurry along toward goals we may not even have chosen. I became a tracker by default, not design, when my tendency to be distracted by life’s smallest signs grew into an unrelenting passion to trace those obscure, often puzzling patterns somewhere, anywhere — to their source or end or simply to some midpoint in between. But when I began tracking lost people, what had begun as an eccentric habit — following footsteps on the ground — quickly matured into an avocation. … I now commonly walk toward a single goal: to meet the person at the other end of the tracks. — Hannah Nyala (from Point Last Seen).