Going Walkabout

 The Australian aborigines have a term -- going walkabout -- that describes a ritual for males during adolescence (10-16) whereby they leave home, interrupt their normal worklives, and live "in the bush" or off the land for 6 months or so.  The term has been adapted to modern times, where teens (typically European) graduating from high school or college take a year off before beginning the next phase of their lives to "go walkabout," to find themselves or to explore the world before settling down.

American culture, on the other hand, has dispensed with such nonsense in our very practical approach to life: "Get on with it;" "Get a job," "Start earning your way," "Start making money" --- all before finding out what life we really want out of life.  In other words, we tend to "go" before we know where we are going or why.

Henry David Thoreau is, in my opinion, an American hero because he defied the usual cultural expectations.  His father owned a pencil factory, but in those days, the pencils were not very satisfactory. According to legend, Henry David Thoreau worked on the problem of making a better pencil out of inferior graphite. He solved the problem by using clay as the binder. With clay he created a superior, smear-free pencil whose hardness was controllable.  Once he had perfected the pencil, Thoreau "went walkabout" into the woods, in order, as he said, "to live deliberately and not to discover when I came to die, that I had not lived."

What is interesting to me about all of this is that from the very beginning of the Bible, Abraham is told by God to "Go [for yourself] from your land and from your birthplace and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you (Gen. 12:1).  One might say these are the first words of the biblical narrative, after the prologue (Gen. 1-12).  The "story of redemption" begins with these words to Abraham:  Go for yourself, or "go walkabout" to discover for yourself what I am doing.

Once we leave the Garden of our parental homes, paradise, our task is seek wisdom about where we are going and how we are going to get there.  So few of us really tackle that task in our desire to start earning a living and supporting ourselves.  Instead, we must eventually deal with a mid-life crisis, wherein we realize that we never really asked ourselves what we really wanted out of life.

God had told Abraham to leave his father's house and to come to "a land that I will show you."  In order to find his way to that land, Abraham had to seek wisdom by building an altar and seeking the Lord in every place that he stopped along the way (see Gen. 12).  Once he had arrived in Canaan, Abraham is told, "Up, walk about the land, through its length and breadth, for I will give it to you" (Gen. 13:17).  Again, even after the long journey from Ur, Haran, and Egypt (stopping places along the way), Abraham is told to walk the length and breadth of Canaan itself.

God wanted Abraham to take possession of the land he was given by walking it and  noting its boundaries.  The closest I can come to explaining this command is Plato's maxim:  the unexamined life is not worth living.  "Going walkabout" is a way of examining life, to see its length and breadth, and of discovering what it means to live life and not to discover when we come to die, that we had not really lived at all.

In the beginning, we are told that God walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening.  Presumably, that's when He and Adam conversed together, as, for example, Enoch did when he "walked with God" in Genesis 5.  Proverbs 6, in speaking of wisdom, notes that "When you walk about, it shall lead you."

Genesis tells us of three people who "walked (about) with God."  In Hebrew, an unusual form of the verb "walk" occurs as hit-halach (walk about) in reference to only three individuals: Noah, Enoch, and Abraham (Gen. 5:22, Gen 6:9, and Gen. 17:1).  In the last instance, Abraham is told, Walk about in My presence and be perfect. (English translations do not include the word "about," but the verbal forms in Hebrew are used only in these cases.)  

Hebrew commentaries indicate that these three men were characterized by their relentless search for wisdom as they "walked (about) with God."

The biblical Abraham is an active person.  We see him moving from one country to another, herding his flocks, leading a nomadic life, but through all of this activity, we see God speaking to him on numerous occasions.  Rabbi Bachyaben Asher ben Chlava, in the 13th century commentary on the Torah, says this: The seeking of wisdom requires movement of the intelligent soul and quietness of the body; this is the opposite of the needs of the body, which require movement of the body but quietness of the soul.  So God said, "I will give it to you," meaning, "I will give you knowledge and wisdom so that you may know the essence of all that exists."  In 1 Kings 5:9, it is written, "And the Eternal gave wisdom to Solomon."

Maybe we all need to "go walkabout" at some point, if not daily, in our lives to discover what it is we are all about.