He stops at an overlook on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and lets the stillness settle. The silence has weight—not emptiness, but pressure. It doesn’t invite thought so much as remove excuses. The canyon asks nothing of him, and just as importantly, it refuses to fill in the blanks. It remains vast and indifferent, making it unmistakable that he is here without instructions.
When he lived on the beach, the environment carried some of this weight for him. The breeze moved through the day like punctuation. The horizon gave everything a direction. Morning walks, light shifting across the water, the tide’s soft insistence—there was an authority to it, gentle but persuasive. The day shaped itself. For a while, that was enough.
But atmosphere only goes so far. Over time, even the most generous landscape exhausts its ability to substitute for intention. Routines turn ambient. The horizon stops answering back. And quietly, without drama, the same question returns.
Standing here, with the land doing all this work—erosion, scale, time made visible—he feels that persistence. The question doesn’t arrive as doubt or dissatisfaction. It arrives as clarity: what am I doing here, every day? Not today. Not on this trip. Every day. What am I practicing when the scenery stops carrying me?
The canyon offers no reply. It doesn’t need to. Its silence makes something else plain: no amount of grandeur can relieve him of authorship. Even here, especially here, the shape of the day remains his to choose.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co
Travel in Life 