A Moment of Rest in The Domain

Sydney One

The Domain / Sydney / NSW / Australia

I’ve got hours to go before go-home time, before sit-awake-over-dark-water time, so I’m headed out for a run in the domain. It would be called the park anywhere else. The domain makes it sound so serious. I am wary of what I might find out there. I will enter the domain from the north and survey its coastal perimeter. Will the rules change when I am in the domain? Will I be entering the domain of an important entity? The domain of the knights of cloven-shield, or some such worse? I shan’t be cavalier. I’ll be ready, trotting in white runners, to defend against what lies within. But it becomes evident upon entry, that there is nothing of the sort. No knights, not of any kind. It really is just a park, and I am disappointed. There are kids flopping around like baby elephant seals. Their moms on park benches wondering if it’s normal, but sitting passively, pretending to ignore them, because this is their one moment of rest.

It is just the domain of normal humans, like any other park. I run its perimeter along the water, for the views, and for the flat terrain. The waterside track traces the bays of Sydney Harbor. It’s a clear and bright morning with clean air. The morning sun shines low across the water, making the harbor bridge and the opera house more dramatic, as if they weren’t enough already. I once again find myself with that frequent re-realization, that this, is my job!

It is, at the very least a very fortunate benefit of it. The actual job was waking up from the bunk to navigate thunderstorms over the equator last night. This part, economically speaking, is merely required rest. This part, in many former years, was fulfilled in El Paso or Des Moines. But today I run along Sydney Harbor and snap a selfie with the opera house behind me, remembering from whence I came. It’s a predictably horrible picture. The opera house is beautiful, and I am just old. It reveals how long it took me to get here. I start uphill as the path turns along Wooloomooloo Bay. The younger runners pass me comfortably, there is no stopping it anymore.

At the top of the hill I find an Australian bottle tree casting a little globe of shade. If it is my duty to rest, so let it be. I have a seat in its shade and survey the harbor, reflecting on the many benefits of my work. All these places it takes me which have become a part of me. But as much as I love the fantastic places I visit, it is the enforced rest time that I most love. It is not a listed benefit of the job, but it is perhaps my favorite one nonetheless. In it I have found treasures in El Paso, Amsterdam, Sydney and Des Moines. In those enforced rest periods each place becomes a part of my own domain in one way or another. After decades they become important pieces in my history. I look forward to my visits, and look forward to my way home more. It is always only a prescribed number of hours away.

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