I have spent a lot of time lately, walking. I used to know a guy in Japan who would walk for miles and miles, just wandering, and I always wondered how he did it. How can someone not bore themselves to death just walking around the city for hours on end? He would come back from his walks and tell us how beautiful the cherry blossoms were in a certain part of town he had discovered or what kinds of shadows the sun makes on the hills as the sun sets. In Japan, I remember thinking, what a bore nature is. I wanted to be able to appreciate nature so badly, but I couldn’t find the time; I didn’t care to find the time to slow down.

So I’ve been slowing down here and walking from place to place, almost an hour each way. As of now, I am still consumed by the following three thoughts: “Holy bejeezus, this walk is taking forever,” “My feet hurt,” and “Am I there yet?” It’s just another example of how I am so stuck on the end result, on crossing things off of my to-do list, that I don’t know how to just walk anymore.

I’m not willing to leave things unorganized. I’m not ready to just let things be. As I walk, I realize how many houses are left unfinished. In Vancouver, I see unfinished buildings and the rush to finish construction, the rush to complete the perfection that the city is to be by the time the Olympics arrive in 2010. In Huancayo, I see unfinished buildings… as unfinished buildings. That’s just the way they are, sometimes for months or years as the family struggles to earn more money, sometimes forever.

And it makes me think of the thirty houses I’ve visited in and around the city of different types of families – different structure, different situations, different economic levels. But I’ve found that the majority of families live in houses that I would consider messy or dirty. To them, it’s okay that there are a million utensils in the kitchen out of place or forever without a place, it’s okay that all their mugs are cracked or chipped in some way, it’s okay that there are irremovable stains everywhere – in the tiles of the floor, in the cabinets, the dressers, the stove, the walls. It’s okay that their closet is actually a shelf with a blanket over top, tilted a bit and never perfectly covering the entire shelf. It’s okay if there are a million projects in-progress that may never be finished. It is a situation that would normally make me go insane, but I am learning to relax.