Down the decrepit street the taciturn man strolled. 

He was an admirable man, for he was a man of balance; while intelligent, he acknowledged and occasionally embraced his ignorance. While accomplished, he was humble, and acted not, or not excessively, for recognition or reward, but out of necessity and self-preservation. While his body was strong and lean, the result of exercise and healthy nutrition, he did not embellish in his appearance, nor did he obsess greatly over the length of his lifetime. He strolled daily, along this forgotten gem of a route, himself a rugged but kindly face atop vague but respectable garments. 

The man paused at the beginning of his walk, squatted, and observed a fine row of insects scuttling across the paved sidewalk. It had been just a week ago that the nearest anthill had shown itself, an apparition, this highway of commerce establishing itself. How small it was, he reflected, and yet so vast was its breadth, so productive and coordinated were its people; but then such is in the eye of the beholder, the man thought, and so perhaps the human is but excessively large, or perhaps all is without measure, and simply is. 

He enjoyed these musings. They conditioned his mind, aligned his thought processes for what was virtuous; that of truth, of thought, of reflection. But more than that they kept him entertained, reminiscent on subjects worthy of discussion but which never took more intellectual real estate than he would allocate for them. The man continued his stroll, breathed deeply, and looked further along his route. The walk was upon the sidewalk on the outskirts of his town, a town which was in fact a rather large settlement, and well-kept, but which had abandoned this earlier portion of its establishment to nature. There were but a few houses here, all spaced intermittently, and all left behind except for a single shed which he suspected remained in use for storage. The sidewalk itself was, albeit not entirely, rather overgrown, the brilliant lavender which was custom to early Spring spilling onto the cobble. The shells of poppies, waiting to burst, announced themselves, their few impatient rose tendrils creeping past the erin. 

The man looked past the ferns and shrubbery, the occasional bluebell sprout or Castilleja, to the trees overhead. While the Sun, pleasing the evening above the furthest treetops, continued to shed its honey corpuscles across the landscape, the long-necked evergreens, interspersed here and there with the shorter and much stouter oaks, blotted out several of its rays, leaving an illuminated but shadowy playground all for the man. Pausing, though he had only gone a few tens of yards, he craned upwards his cranium, until his forehead was nearly level with the soil, and marvelled, how without human intellect but natural selection such crops could shoot so near the fragile aether, resilient, and yet made only of fibre and collagen, tied down only by protrusions under the earth. And then was their beauty, of course; the evergreens, which in this place were of the commodious variety, the needles shielding its trunk yet permitting entrance; the oaks, appearing like someone who might have been tall but exhibited poor posture, its trunk knobby and its leaves green, yellowing towards the edges. 

Through this the man made his steps and formed his stroll. His shoes were old, worn, and yet continued to be useful, as they kicked up small pebbles, scraped the path. Several points of its upper mesh had been shredded, and the heel’s sole was uncannily dimpled, but the man experienced no pain and found the fit reasonable, and the profit from its not needing replacement appreciable. They were once painted, he recalled as he approached a hilly interruption of the originally consistent pavement, shiny black and deep, iridescent blue, but most of the paint had peeled away, the husk (though he did not care for the term) left as but a smudged grey. The socks within it were newer, his left having only a small tear about his pinky toe, and the gratuitously baggy pants above covering his legs and comforting the skin which might otherwise have ailed. The armour was in all regards suitable.

Once past the aforementioned and abrupt breakage of pavement and cobble, the sidewalk continued to slant in much the same way a shoreline slants with the parabolae of waves. So the man adjusted his pace, and continued to breathe deeply. How much beauty there was that surrounded him, and only a portion, a mere kernel of his cranium that could even begin to comprehend the absolute value, the glory of all which surrounded him. Out of nothing came this, the product of random chance and entropy, all in simultaneity with the logical processes devised by evolution. And yet still, elsewhere, in less splendid realms, he would find, or invent, or purport so many ways to persuade himself to the notion that all things were trapped within the confines of a perpetually evil universe. He pondered to himself, and though he had realised it before, the man thought how perhaps he best ought to mind the real preciousness of his world, to the affection for all things the constituent of being possessed, that simple thing he called goodness. 

The man decided to elongate his walk. He still had a couple hours before the sunset, a phenomenon which he never deigned to miss, so with this resolved in his mind the man stepped over the brush’s barrier and laid down on the grass. The position was not superb; the sharp edges of some obscure, dandelion-like plant dug into his arms, and the grass provided such little bedding above the earth, but he altered himself to comfort. For in nature, in things of virtue, the man thought, one finds honour. So he gazed at the sky, himself but a man on a stroll.