Out Back Among The Trails, Hills

It rains every third or fourth day, and with each day alone and home, I feel the awful sense of isolation and exile. It's like being in a hermitage. Someone asked me why not take a flight out of Singapore and get out in the open and the wild. Little do people know that the open and the wild is not "out there", as it's all a condition of the mind. While I may not have been urgently back in my running and swimming and diet regimes of earlier this year, there being no objective or drive to do so... I am already in the sort of self-imposed exile and isolation, where being forgotten and among the peripheral life of urban society leaves one to live with the mental and emotional gymnastics required to sustain a healthy perception and sensibility. You don't need to be in perpetual state of zensumi or nirvana to understand what Kerouac meant to describe being a beatnik. If I have not jumped the trails or conquered laps, there is also my need to work the mind's muscles and lever the world around my life with the fulcrum of consciousness. I mean, every day, I can imaginatively place myself out of this flat in the middle of Singapore, to the furthest reaches of space and geography and imagine myself isolated and in self-imposed exile. Of course the comforts of life follow me (I have cable and electricity!), but every time I am out in the open, in the long bright hours of the afternoon, I can see myself free from the incumbences of this location. Just breathing the air, looking at the bright blue above, noticing every little expanse of nature in its fullness around, from leaf to twig, from dirt trail to mud pool and glare of sun, I know I am connected to the whole earth in an odd and inexplicable way. Again, the imagination is the playground, and as I run or swim, stroll or slumber, there is the great expanse which the verdant mind is a willing canvas for the happy mental athlete to cavort and frolick all the way.