Yesterday, my mother and I went hiking. The sun was high, as were our spirits, and we set out with unnecessary gusto, almost gambolling up the steep portion of tarmac that separates our house from the trail. A minute disaster soon struck. My mother, flushed and doleful, halted our progress and briefly fulminated against the futility of exercise. I paraphrase her sentiment: the trouble, she said, is that one never gets fit, for as soon as one is fit, one must stay fit--one never gets anything. The sufferings of Sisyphus were manifest. After this moment of frustration and doubt, we trooped on and, an hour later, successfully attained the piny, rock-patched summit. Below us spread the city and the sea, behazed with dwindling fog. Fitness seemed beside the point.
Our sole surviving house cat, Cherry, was ostracized from the house in January; my mother sealed the cat door, swept the house, brushed the couch, gave her bedclothes a good tumble in the washing machine, and welcomed in a life free of fur-clung clothing, drool-bedewed pillows, midnight meowings, and the hithering and thithering of our feline's suspect noctambulations. For a time, Cherry relentlessly sought ingress. A paw would squeeze itself beneath the door; a bang would startle us to the window; the chimney would omit an ominous rattle. And then one day Cherry's siege ceased. We decided that the door could once again be left open. Cherry paced about the doormat, stationed herself abreast of the threshold, sniffed at the phantom portal, and beat a puzzled retreat. For weeks no attempt to enter the house was made. The other day, however, Cherry magically appeared on the couch's armrest. We hissed her from the house. This seems to have been a big breakthrough for our cat; she now knows to enter when we are not watching, and we make a point of closing the door when we sally forth.
My point is this: everything is relearning. Whether tackling the scree-plagued perpendiculars of the National Forest hills in a losing attempt to maintain cardiovascular wellness or puzzling over the penetrability of air-made barricades, one must attempt and reattempt countless times in order to make progress; and progress, it would seem, is also a constant relearning: a stepping stone to a stepping stone.
