Walking 34.6 Miles to-and-from Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve — and Meditating About Work

Evidence, or it didn’t happen, I guess.

I persuaded my wife, Tasha Kersey Aoaeh, to join me for what I thought would be a casual 26.2 mile walk to the Norman J. Levy Park & Preserve in Merrick, NY yesterday.

This was a welcome sight after 18 miles of walking.

But I totally botched my estimates of the distance it would take us just to get there. We arrived after walking 18 miles! By the time we made it back home, we’d far exceeded the 27 miles I had assumed would be the worst case scenario.

I looked calm, but I was starting to worry about how Tasha and I would make it back home.

From Wikipedia: Norman Levy Park and Preserve was once a landfill but was transformed to a park space in 2000. The park is the highest point on Long Island’s South Shore, and has an average altitude of around 120 feet. From this highest point, the New York City Skyline, Jones Beach, and the Oceanside landfill can be seen, along with other locations.

There’s something about scenes like this that make me take a deep breath — path less travelled, perhaps.

I mostly wanted to hang out on the pier — which was pretty amazing on a day like yesterday.

Tasha said this looked like the clouds were painted in . . . I agree; It’s so breathtaking it looks like a painting.

This is the longest distance Tasha has walked — her previous record is 22 miles which we walked together a few weeks ago. I walked 37 miles on September 4, 2022 — also to this park and back.

At this stage I was starting to think we might be able to make it back home after all . . . But it would be 30 miles, at least. Now wouldn’t that be something else?

Now I want to see if I can walk 50 miles in one go. Perhaps I can persuade Tasha to join me for that walk too. I still need to decide when I’ll do that though, and I’ll need to plan the logistics a bit better than I have in the past. That said, I want to do it this year.

The journey is ever evolving, ever changing, but it’s the journey that matters more than the destination. “Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.” — Drake

It’s always interesting to see how the public authorities are trying to ensure that human activity is less harmful to the natural environment. As much as is being done, a lot more needs to be done . . . It’s something I pay attention to each time I go on one of my ultra long walks — attitudes are changing, but they are not changing quickly enough or dramatically enough to confront the scale of the crisis we face as our activities endanger the natural environment, and hence our own well being.

I can’t take enough pictures like this one . . .

This is what makes me excited about building REFASHIOND Ventures: The Industrial Transformation Fund with Lisa Morales-Hellebo, and our focus on technology and innovation that promotes human wellbeing while nurturing the vitality and health of the natural environment.

It is an acutely optimistic bet on human ingenuity to successfully solve the biggest problem mankind has faced so far.

Join us.

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
- Henry David Thoreau

My son turns 16 in September. Lisa’s oldest son heads to college next month. What world will we hand our children, and their children? It’s a question we think about every day.

REFASHIOND Ventures: The Industrial Transformation Fund invests in early stage startups refashioning supply chains through Data & AI, Advanced Materials, Advanced Manufacturing, & Next Generation Logistics; Defensible through economic moats.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
- Margaret Mead

Hempstead Lake Park is one of our favorite haunts to walk to from home, and we used it as one of our pit stops yesterday . . . At the time we took this photo we had walked exactly 27 miles. We needed to collect our thoughts for the final 7+ miles of walking.

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