Tag: walking

Categories
Aging San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Permission of Fridays

Doug always walked a half-step ahead, which meant he saw things first, which meant I was usually watching him see them — the tilt of his head, the small pause before he brought the camera up — before I ever turned to look myself. Market Street on a Friday morning has its own weather system, independent of the sky: the gray light fog gives even bright colors.

We would set out with no destination, which was the whole method — what Jay Maisel, who died this summer at ninety-five, called going out empty. Leave the plan at home, he taught generations of photographers, so there’s room left in you to see something you didn’t already expect. You cannot plan to be astonished. You can only put yourself in the path of it and hope.

I have thought about those walks more than I expected to, now that they are gone. Not gone dramatically — no falling-out, no single last Friday we knew was the last Friday. Covid arrived and shut the passes between people the way weather closes a mountain road, and by the time it reopened, the rhythm had broken. We still talk. We just don’t walk anymore, and I have never entirely worked out why something so simple didn’t start back up, the way you’d think a habit that good would insist on its own return. It just didn’t come back.

Susan Orlean, in Joyride, writes about being a writer as a kind of permission — an excuse to linger in places past the point a normal person would move along, and then to go back and report on what was seen. She’s citing Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

A camera grants the identical permission a notebook does. Nobody stops a man with a camera on Market Street and asks him what he’s doing there. The camera is its own credential — I have a reason to be looking at you, at this doorway, at the light falling across these particular twenty feet of sidewalk, longer than is socially normal. Doug and I weren’t tourists and we weren’t reporters and we weren’t, most days, even talking about what we saw until afterward, over lunch. We were two men who had given ourselves formal license to pay attention to a city we loved, as if it might not be there next Friday.

It mostly was there next Friday. Until it wasn’t, in the way that most disruptions to a good practice aren’t dramatic so much as quietly permanent — a scheduling gap that never gets rescheduled, a street that starts to feel unfamiliar again because you stopped walking it with intention. I still have the pictures. A woman waiting at a bus stop with an expression I never satisfactorily explained to myself. The chess player’s hands, mid-reset, waiting on the next stranger. Doug, once, caught by someone else’s lens, walking a half-step ahead of a man he didn’t know was photographing him photographing the city.

The third instruction is the one that survived when the walks didn’t. I don’t walk Market Street with Doug anymore, but I’m telling you about it now, on a blog nobody assigned me to keep for twenty-five years. The credential just changed instruments — camera to keyboard. Orlean’s point, I think, is that the excuse and the obligation were always the same thing. You get to be there because you intend to come back and testify, and the testifying is the toll, due whether or not the place is still there when you go looking for it again.

Doug and I are not going to start walking on Fridays again. I’m too old for that kind of recommitment, and pretending otherwise would just be a nicer way of lying to myself. Plus physically it’s just beyond me now. This essay is itself a kind of substitute — the telling standing in for a habit of attending that got interrupted and never fully repaired.

Mary Oliver’s instructions don’t say what to do when the astonishment outlasts the practice that produced it. Maybe that’s the fourth instruction nobody wrote down: keep telling about it anyway, especially after you’ve stopped going. Or at least remembering.

Categories
AI Apple Google

The Library You Already Own

Sharon Park in the morning is not a dramatic place. There’s a duck pond, a stand of oaks that go gold too briefly in November, and a loop I’ve walked enough times that my legs know it better than my eyes do. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of place where a person starts talking to himself. Not out loud. In the productive, low-grade way — turning a sentence over, arguing with an idea from the day before, checking a thought against something you believe about yourself.

I think in five years I’ll be doing that walk with something else along. Not a search engine. Not another chatbot trained to know a little about everything and a lot about nothing in particular. Something closer to a second set of eyes on my own life — a reasoning engine, lean and mostly private, that has actually read the things I’ve written and doesn’t need me to explain who I am before it’s useful.

Here’s the distinction that matters, and it took me longer than it should have to see it clearly. The AI industry has spent years in an arms race over how much of the world a model can hold — more facts, more languages, more of the internet compressed into weights. That race will keep going, and somebody else can have it. What I want is smaller and stranger: a model that knows comparatively little about the world and quite a lot about me. My core values document. The portfolio spreadsheets. Fifteen years of blog posts. The half-finished notes for the I-280 project, sitting in a folder, waiting for someone — or something — to ask the right question about them.

I spent a career in payments infrastructure, which means I spent a career thinking about a very specific kind of trust: the kind where a stranger’s system has to make a judgment call, in milliseconds, about whether to say yes. Fraud models don’t work because they know everything about commerce. They work because they know an enormous amount about one account, one pattern, one person’s ordinary Tuesday — enough to notice when Tuesday stops being ordinary. That’s the architecture I keep picturing, aimed inward instead of outward. Not a system trying to know the world. A system trying to know me, well enough to notice when I’m drifting from what I said I cared about.

I can already feel the shape of the mornings this would change. Right now, when I sit down to look at RMD requirements against the tax picture, I’m doing the translation myself — pulling numbers into a story I can actually feel the weight of. A reasoning engine grounded in my real holdings wouldn’t just run the scenario. It would know that I don’t want the scenario dressed up as a spreadsheet; I want it dressed up as a conversation, unhurried, the kind you’d have over lunch with someone who already knows the whole situation. And on the mornings when I sit down to write, instead of staring at a blinking cursor and a blank page that has no idea I exist, I’d be handing a draft to something that has actually read my last two hundred posts and knows the difference between the sentence I’d write and the sentence I’d cut.

None of this is especially exotic technology. Apple and Google are already building toward it — Neural Engines fast enough to do real reasoning on-device, retrieval systems that can reach into your own files instead of the entire internet, fine-tuning that’s getting cheap enough to personalize rather than merely customize. The more interesting story here isn’t privacy, though privacy is real. It’s architectural: what happens when the expensive, impressive part of the system — the part that knows everything — becomes optional, and the cheap, personal part — the part that knows you — becomes the whole point.

What I don’t yet know is what this will cost me. A tool that reasons this well about my own life is also a tool I could lean on instead of doing the leaning myself, and there’s a version of this future where the walk around Sharon Park stops being mine and starts being a conversation with something that finishes my sentences a little too well. I’d want some way of knowing, plainly, what it’s drawing from and what it’s guessing at — less a nutrition label than a kind of honesty I could check against, the way you’d check a fraud model’s confidence score before you trusted it with a yes.

But most mornings, I think I’d take the trade. Not because I want to think less. Because for thirty years I’ve been collecting the raw material — the notebooks, the portfolios, the half-built essays — and it would be something, finally, to walk beside a mind that had actually done the reading.

Categories
Living New York City Serendipity

The Grammar of Looking Up

The apartment was across from Penn Station, which meant that for one stretch of months in the mid-1970s, the architecture of my days was decided by trains I never took. I walked east instead, every morning, toward the United Nations, where a man named Frank Smith ran a personal development course that IBM SRI had decided its young people should sit through. I don’t remember most of what Frank said in that room. I remember one thing he said about the street outside it.

He told us we should start looking up. Literally — on our walks back and forth across midtown, Penn Station to the East Side and back, twice a day, rain or not. Not all the way, usually. Mostly it was a floor or three: the window line just above the awnings, the cornice on a building you’d never once registered had a second story, let alone a sixth. The full climb to the rooflines — gargoyles, setbacks, terra cotta lions — was the occasional reward. Almost no one looks up in New York, he said, not even a little. The city trains you out of it. Too much at eye level demands your attention — the cabs, the steam, the man asking for change, the woman walking too slowly in front of you — so everything above your own eyeline disappears by consensus, not just the tops. Habits can be replaced. Look up enough times, even just a floor or three, and you’ll see a different city than the one everyone else is seeing.

I tried it. Walking up past the Pierpont Morgan stretch, or wherever the route took me, chin lifted some small number of degrees, feeling slightly foolish. Most days that was the whole of it — a window line, a row of air conditioners, a sign painted directly onto brick decades before anyone called that vintage. Every so often the chin would tip back further, and there’d be something up there worth the extra degrees. A gargoyle with its mouth open mid-roar, forty years before air conditioning made gargoyles decorative rather than necessary. But that was the rare find. The habit was the floor or three. Nobody else on the sidewalk was seeing any of it, because nobody else on the sidewalk was looking at all.

The chin came back down on its own a couple of times a week, somewhere around a street corner with a slice joint on it, because New York seems to put one on every corner whether you need it or not. You smelled it before you saw it — that specific combination of tomato, oregano, and hot grease that has no name I’ve ever found. Looking up was Frank’s discipline.

The pizza smell required none. It just reached out and took your head by the chin and turned it level again, toward the window with the steam on the glass and the guy folding a slice in half before he handed it over.

It is a small thing Frank Smith said in a room near the UN fifty years ago, and I have carried it around since the way you carry around a key to a house you no longer own. I don’t know what happened to the course, or to IBM SRI’s faith in such courses, or to Frank himself. I know what happened to the habit. It outlived the year, outlived the apartment across from Penn Station, outlived several cities I’ve lived in since that didn’t have the same vertical drama to reward the looking. I still do it. I did it last week on a walk that had nothing to do with midtown at all, tilting my head back on a street in California to find whatever was up there worth finding, and catching myself mid-gesture, thinking: that’s Frank’s, that one, still running fifty years later on the program he installed.

Most of what we’re taught to notice, we’re taught by people who wanted something from us — a sale, a vote, a grade. Frank wanted nothing, as far as I could tell, except that we see more of the city than we’d been seeing. It’s such a small ambition for a teacher to have. Look up. That’s the whole curriculum. And it’s the only thing from that course, the only thing from that whole strange year of being instructed in personal development by a man whose face I can no longer quite reconstruct, that I still do, unbidden, on every street I’ve walked since.

Categories
Atomic Energy Nuclear Energy Science

The Traffic Light That Split the Atom

If you wandered past the Mathematical Society and kept going, you’d come to a pedestrian crossing on Southampton Row where it meets Russell Square in London’s Bloomsbury. On a humid morning in September 1933, something world-changing happened there.

It was Tuesday, September 12. A cool, drizzling, quintessentially English autumn day. Leo Szilard — a brilliant, restless Hungarian-Jewish physicist who had fled Nazi Germany earlier that year — stood waiting at the traffic light. He was irritated, as people often are when a red light holds them up on a gray morning. He had been thinking about Ernest Rutherford’s recent lecture, in which the great pioneer of nuclear physics had dismissed the idea of extracting usable energy from the atom as “moonshine.”

Szilard disagreed. And as the light turned green and he stepped off the curb, the thought arrived in a flash.

What if a single neutron struck a nucleus and caused it to split, releasing two neutrons? Those two could split two more nuclei, releasing four — then eight, sixteen, thirty-two. In a large enough mass of the right material, the process could sustain itself — a chain reaction — and liberate enormous amounts of energy.

He saw it all in that instant: the possibility of limitless power, and the shadow of a weapon unlike anything the world had ever known.

Szilard was not in a laboratory. He was not surrounded by colleagues or equipment. He was simply crossing a London street, a refugee with too much on his mind, when the future opened up in front of him.

He filed a patent within the year and had it kept secret by the British Admiralty. He spent the rest of his life in the aftermath of that crossing — working on the first controlled chain reaction in Chicago in 1942, then becoming one of the most tireless advocates against the use of the weapons he had foreseen. The man who imagined the chain reaction spent decades trying to break it.

The spot where it happened remains utterly ordinary. Buses and taxis still rumble through the intersection. Tourists hurry toward the British Museum. Students cross on their way to Russell Square. There is no plaque. Szilard himself, given how deeply pacifist he became, might not have wanted one.

That feels right. The moment wasn’t grand or ceremonial. It was the kind of quiet, internal shift that happens when a prepared mind meets an ordinary irritation at a traffic light.

The hinges of history are fragile things, and they don’t announce themselves. Enormous consequences — nuclear power, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, decades of arms-control efforts — all trace back to one man’s realization while crossing a rainy London street. And once a thought like that arrives, it doesn’t leave. Szilard carried his for the rest of his life. He understood, earlier than almost anyone, both the dazzling promise and the terrible cost of what he had imagined at that crossing.

I came to this story through Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine. It stopped me cold on the page, the way the best historical details do — not because it was dramatic, but because it was so ordinary.

Next time you’re stuck at a pedestrian light on a humid morning, pause for a moment. The light will change. You’ll step forward. But you never really know what might change with you.

Categories
Living Quotations

In the Moonlight

“In the moonlight, we walked over an abandoned vineyard. The posts had fallen down, and vines inched about for something to crawl up on; one had twisted around a rusting baler and another climbed a broken plow. We passed a foundation of a barn that had collapsed, a toppled chimney, and a weedy depression where an icehouse had stood. “These are all dreams we’re walking over,” I said.” (William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways)

Categories
Exercise Health Living

Eight Years

Eight years ago today, I began one of the most important health journeys of my life. I entered my local hospital to begin treatment for morbid obesity. At the time, I weighed 305 lbs and had a BMI in the mid-30s. My blood sugar had been steadily creeping upward, and I had developed a serious problem in my right foot, aggravated by high blood sugar causing deterioration of the bone structure. Clearly, I was in serious trouble if I failed to take action. The time had come to make a change.

Unfortunately, I had tried twice before to lose significant weight, only to yo-yo down and then back up in weight. This time, I needed to be truly committed.

With the help of health professionals, I began a serious weight loss program. Following their counsel, I avoided bariatric surgery and instead focused on drastically reducing portion sizes. I also completely gave up alcoholic beverages, began a daily weighing regimen, and started working out with a personal trainer twice a week. With his guidance, we added a daily elliptical workout and a 20-30 minute outdoor walk. These have become regular habits, and I’m convinced this combination has made it possible for me to keep the excess weight off.

Here I am eight years later weighing between 210 and 215 lbs. I feel so much better than when I was so heavy eight years ago. As I’ve told many of my friends, I just wish I had taken losing excess weight so seriously much, much earlier.

When my calendar reminder popped up this morning informing me that it was eight years ago today that I began this journey, I decided to take a moment to note it here as well!

Categories
Exercise Living Walking

Demons hate fresh air!…

While driving to the post office this morning to drop off a photography book that I sold, I was listening to the latest edition of Len Edgerly’s Kindle Chronicles and his discussion with his longtime friend Bryan Person.

At one point, Len mentioned how he uses Austin Kleon’s latest book Keep Going as a trigger for morning journaling – and how one chapter in particular, highlighted the benefits of just taking a walk and getting away from “our devices!”

From Austin’s blog:

Here’s Linn Ullmann, in an interview with Vogue, on her father Ingmar Bergman:

My father was a very disciplined and punctual man; it was a prerequisite for his creativity. There was a time for everything: for work, for talk, for solitude, for rest. No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air. So when I make up excuses not to work, I hear his voice in my head: Get up, get out, go to your work.

This notion, for me, is one of the things I enjoy about street photography. While it’s fun to take some pictures, chase the interesting light, find exciting “stages” and backgrounds and great people, a big component of my enjoyment is just getting out, walking, and enjoying the fresh air and the scene. My friend Doug Kaye and I have talked about on our walks – how great it is just to get out of the house, into the city, and getting some exercise – both physically and for our minds.

At the moment, I’m just back from a walk at our local neighborhood park. It’s a lovely warm (but not too warm) Saturday afternoon and there were several couples out walking as well, a group taking portraits with the pond/fountain in the background, a couple chatting seriously while sitting on one of the picnic tables, etc. I often take my AirPods along on these walks to listen to a podcast – but today I didn’t. I wanted to just be in the moment, alone with my thoughts, without any other audio stimulation. It was great! Twenty minutes yielded just over a mile of walking – and the fresh air certainly helped chase the demons away.