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I had such a good time walking this morning. I was not in a hurry, so instead of walking briskly I was able to—well, not to dawdle but to go at a walking pace, the pace the Italians call andante. It's not a pace that I'm really familiar with, since my usual walk is a brisk full stride.
This morning my walking pace felt to me like the universal pace of those who walk. At that pace you are making progress, you are moving to where you want to go, but you have time to see and absorb everything around you. You are with the countryside, with the front yards. That pace felt comfortable within my body. I felt connected to the inhabitants of Hardy's English villages, in those days when visiting the next village involved a walk of four or seven or ten miles. I can feel myself moving along the dusty path between villages and I know that my pace is the natural pace of man. At such a pace, even a bicycle seems much too fast.
This must be the pace that God had in mind when She created Adam and Eve. "Walk around this place," She said, "but slowly, not too fast. You aren't doing this for the aerobic value of the walk. You're doing it because I asked you to look around. See the flowers. Hear the birds." And so forth, She said to them, including a little speech about fruits and trees.
So the first thing they did, after a gentle amble over the grounds, was to use the roundness of the apple as their inspiration for putting wheels on things.
And here we are—suffocated by wheeled things and too numb to know that on some cosmic level the wheels have fallen off.
Will God even consider starting over with a new Adam, a new Eve? Maybe She'll tempt them with square tomatoes rather than round apples, thus completely avoiding the wheels business.
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