Walking

Walking is very stimulating, isn't it? I have so many thoughts and ideas when we start walking. It's good and bad. I end the day feeling too undecided, mostly because there are too many options; and all the options I thought about have advantages and disadvantages that weigh against each other, and if I started out with a problematic thought, by the end of the walk I have twenty.

I couldn't even settle on today's diary entry, which should be about a walk on the rugged wooded and wild side of south Lamma Island.


Should I remember Hong Kong and China? How poetic and irritating the damn place is? How you can take in the view of seas and mountains in one grand, eyeball-punching vista, then catch a sight of the young fisherman, diving from his wooden rowing boat, acting out the same answer to the problem of catching his dinner and feeding his family like several thousand years never passed?



Or how I'll never convince all unbelievers that this mucking about on country paths is a valid education, one conducted out of school, with wandering talk about building regulations, graves, death rituals, fish farms and pastry.



Could be the cruel realities of being a home educating parent. A narrative of the vengeance I wanted to take about half way round, when one of the creatoids abusing the name of daughter tipped me so far to the brink of exasperation that equalling and returning her force by pushing her off a cliff seemed a much better response than merely clutching at my head and choking on the sobs.



But then I wanted to remember the discussion about Hong Kong rural architecture, and the protection of a heritage, and how problematic that is, if the heritage architecture is composed of disused pig pens, agricultural outhouses, old concrete buildings, and an abandoned village school, which merits a panel explaining how rare and important the structure is, but inside it's the community dump.



I wondered, of course, about reporting on local news. The fretting over illegal immigrants, the tree hunting, wild pigs, and politics of gully maintenance.



But then we walked through an area of abandoned houses, so spooky and creepy there in the woods that I could only think Blair Witch and wish I were a proper photographer to shiver you to your marrow with those staring empty eyes and broken bones.





I can't decide. Squirrel says her thinking is clear. She's coming back to Hong Kong and walking that path we never took. Shark says it's sensible to leave something undone. Tiger scowls, and says she never chose to come along in the first place.