April Fools

So our little world played sort of an April Fool's joke on Rebekah and me last night -- or maybe we were inadvertently playing the fools ourselves.

It was a beautiful evening, and around 7 p.m. we decided to go out for a walk in a neighborhood nearby.  Across the street from our place is a fairly large Apple Computer campus, as well as other businesses and several apartment complexes.  We were walking near all of that and spied a trail next to a building that I hadn't seen before.  In the spirit of adventure we decided to take it.

This led into a woodsy area with many additional trails.  Most of these were closer to deer trails than the sculpted park variety, but that was fine with us.  Again, we were having an adventure.  Maybe an hour later we finally emerged from this amazingly beautiful forest into another residential neighborhood.

Rebekah and I looked at each other and said, "Where the hell are we?!?"  Not only was it a neighborhood that we'd never seen, but there didn't even seem to be any streets that we'd even heard of.  "We're not in Kansas anymore." :)  A little ways along we saw an old fellow in his front yard and stopped to get our bearings from him.

I said, "We were just walking on those amazing trails over there and we got a little disoriented.  Can you point us toward Parmer Lane or Riata Trace Circle?"  He looked at us like he thought we might be on drugs or something and scratched his head.

"Parmer?  Are you sure that's where you want to go?  That's really far from here," he said.

Rebekah had spied the top of a large office building beyond some trees in the distance a few minutes earlier.  She thought it might be a Schwab office building that she'd seen before.  If so, she knew where that was so she asked, "Is Research Boulevard near here?"

Now the old guy seemed a little more comfy with these weird kids on his sidewalk.  "Sure," he said, pointing, "just take that road until you hit Duval and turn right, then you'll run into Research."

So we started walking, and walking, oh, and walking some more.  It turns out that we were miles from our place, like three or four.  But, at least we knew where we were now.  Another hour or so later and we finally stumbled back home.

Now you might think that this would cause some irritation or maybe frustration, but it only caused us to feel a little exhausted.  We planned for a casual walk and ended up with an adventure and quite a workout, but it was actually really fun.

It gave me an opportunity to "become friendly with the present moment," as Eckhart Tolle likes to say.  When you do that, so called "problems" just seem to melt away. :)