Heroes Not Zombies

I took this photo of a path in a Japanese garden because I’d never seen wavy tiles like this before. In fact, having seen this one, I then came across several more. Although, many years on, I’ve never seen paving tiles, or stones, like this, for sale anywhere in Europe.

Maybe some of you will look at this and feel a bit unsteady, or dizzy, because they give the impression of flowing water, and you know how it is when you stand at the edge of the ocean and after crashing onto the sand, the water runs back between your feet, back to where it came from. It can feel quite destabilising. So, I think these wave forms have the power to communicate the sensation of movement, of flow, of change, and, yes, even of direction.

But I didn’t find them at all destabilising when I walked on them, rather I felt like I was walking/surfing/skiing/sailing over the surface of the Earth…..or maybe, rather, over the surface of the oceans. I love how this simple shape laid out in this repeating pattern captures the sense of life and movement. It felt completely different from walking over a pretty featureless tarmac, or over square, right angled, hard edged, separate slabs.

The other thing I thought of as I walked along this path was the story that Susan Jeffers tells in her famous “Feel the Fear” book, where she describes how a plane traveling from A to B spends only a tiny percentage of its time actually heading in the exact direction which would be a straight line between the two points. Rather the pilot is constantly adjusting the direction of the flight of the plane, a little bit to the right, then a “correction”, to the left, then back again, and so on. It’s a lovely metaphor for the need to be flexible and adaptable. It shows us how we need to proceed by going a little bit this way, then a little bit that way, all the time. It’s a counsel against so called “perfection” – as if there is “only one right way”. There never is.