The answer, poet Wallace Stevens once observed, is sometimes just a walk around the lake. Or in my case, a walk to work.

As winter begins to lose its grip, evidenced by the first brave shoots of daffodils that emerged a few days before the last weekend's snowfall, my dawn walks to work and afternoon hikes home have resumed, providing a welcome perspective on things.

It's only a mile each way, two total, but during the 50 or so minutes this walking meditation takes place - a full hour if I dawdle, either to scratch the ears of the gated lady pug on Pennsylvania or chat with a neighbor who has also been in the hutch for months - something akin to transformation occurs.

Watching the moon at dawn, writes the ancient Japanese bard Izumi Shikibu -

Solitary, mid sky

I knew myself completely.

Yes, it should be plainly obvious, I have been reading poets this winter. Lots of them. Ancient Japanese bards, Chinese philosophers, Persian mystics, New England transcendentals, Irish sages, Victorian masters.

My college-boy son is largely to blame. He phoned up after Christmas to ask the old man's opinion on specific poems and the cultural role of poets. I told him poets speak more honestly than pundits. His inquiry started something stirring, like those brave daffodil shoots breaking the hardened soil.

And now a small dog-eared anthology is my faithful traveling companion, tucked into my inner breast pocket to and from work, given to me many years ago by a kindred winter soul awaiting spring, my old best friend in Maine. Several times I've just paused to read poems at random.

Things Fall Apart

This is useful because part of me fears our national life has never been more fractured and dysfunctional. Our sports heroes have turned out to be losers, cheaters, frauds. Our elected officials are scarcely better, maybe worse. Their wronged wives are writing tell-all memoirs, doing tour stops on "Today."

One major party has cut so many back-room deals it recalls Tammany Hall at its best, or worst. The other party is so bereft of constructive ideas they can basically all be written on the palm of a hand.

Meanwhile, citizens are angry, worried, feeling helpless, going broke, losing faith. We are warned that a terrorist strike is certain by summer. We are treading water on a sinking ship, drowning in our own debt. Didn't Mr. Yeats see this coming?

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the land.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand.

On Wednesday afternoon as I was walking home in the welcome sunshine, eating a chocolate Easter egg a friend on Real Estate Row gave me as I passed her window, another friend who is just starting his career in sports media phoned me to ask if I'd heard the rumor that Tiger Woods was planning to conduct a press conference on Friday, probably to announce his return to professional golf.

He seemed truly excited by this news and wondered why I hadn't commented on Tiger's troubles in print. I explained I have no real opinion of Tiger Woods. Or didn't until very recently.

Given his free fall from grace, I might have advised him to take a year off and disappear completely from sight, put all his financial deals on hold and tell his agents to temporarily stuff it, grow a beard and go to work in an Oakland soup kitchen or Mother Teresa's Calcutta poorhouse, read a lot of Rumi and Thomas Hardy, send a few millions anonymously to Haiti relief, hike alone through Nepal, take his trophy wife away for six months to try to convince her she's anything but.

The Point of Life

But unlike Arnold, Jack and the stars who preceded them, who can ever really know Tiger Woods? Compared with the stars who made the splendid game he inherited, Tiger Woods has given absolutely nothing back to golf except a generation of kids whose acquisitive moms and dads want them to be the next Tiger Woods. And now the Tiger Woods Life Plan eerily turns out to resemble the John Edwards Presidential Plan.

Besides, my friend Dan Jenkins said it best in his April column for Golf Digest that may or may not ever appear in print. Here's some poetic snippets:

"Now excuse me a moment while I try to envision Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus playing video games and eating Froot Loops while they try to deal with a career problem. Of course, Hogan, Palmer and Nicklaus never set themselves up to be statues in Central Park. ... They never sold themselves as the Greatest Family Values brand ever, and conquered the marketplace with it. ... They were never what Tiger allowed himself to become from the start: spoiled, pampered, hidden, guarded, orchestrated and entitled."

On Thursday afternoon, just as I reached the lady pug on Pennsylvania, my young friend phoned back to say he was disappointed that Tiger's "news conference" was merely going to be a public statement staged at PGA Tour headquarters with no questions allowed from reporters.

You could hear the disappointment in his voice, but I tried to cheer him up by mentioning that the Golf Writers Association of America, to which we both belonged, was officially boycotting the sham. As a bonus, I gave him a snatch of Gensei, the Japanese Buddhist monk, from page 86 of my trusty little volume.

The point of life is to know what is enough -

Why envy those otherworld immortals?

With the happiness held in a one-inch-square heart,

You can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.

The pug listened intently. She seems to get the point, anyway.

Tsunami of Change

The first e-mail was sent over the Internet in 1992. Today, this very day, the number of e-mails received and sent will exceed the population of the planet.

A wise friend sent me this startling information taken from a video making the rounds on the Internet this week. He studies the rise of China and India and wonders how the youth of America will keep pace.

The video reveals all sorts of profound changes taking place at hyperspeed, factors that will reshape the world our children inhabit. Among them, China will soon be the No. 1 English-speaking nation on earth, and the 28 percent of the Indian population with the highest IQs is larger than the population of all North America. The top 10 in-demand jobs this year simply did not exist six years ago. The amount of groundbreaking technical information doubles every year.

I probably should have been worried about this deluge of information, this tsunami of change, just as I should be concerned about the Tiger follies or Nancy Pelosi's power grab. But walking always makes me feel better about the world changing around us.

And the view from ground level was pretty encouraging this week, I must say, as winter eased up and daffodils poked up their brows.

In the spirit of these rapidly changing times, however, I paused by a yard where a young worker was planting 50 baby boxwoods to read a pair of text messages from my children, the college scholars. The one in Vermont just needed an ear, and a little grocery money. The one in Carolina needed textbook money and to vent.

I gave them what they asked for plus some really helpful advice from Mr. Wu-Men, the 10th century Zen Chinese master.

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,

A cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,

This is the best season of your life.

It amazed me to think my carefully pecked-out text replies flew away like startled birds and almost simultaneously alighted half a second later somewhere on a snowy street corner in Vermont and a sunny student union in Alamance County. They probably all laughed at their old man's spring optimism. Hope so, anyway.

A little farther along on Oldfield, meanwhile, a Mexican gentleman wearing protective ear gear cranked up his gas-powered leaf blower and began blowing the remains of winter into a gutter pile.

Truthfully I have no clue whether global warming is something I should worry about or not. This side says that. That side says this. But if I were named czar of the world tomorrow, I would immediately do two things:

• Ban all gas-powered leaf blowers.

• Ban all czars and promptly resign.

I know it's a small thing but it would be enough for me to leave the world a little quieter than I found it, before or after work.

Best-selling author Jim Dodson, editor of PineStraw magazine and Sunday essayist with The Pilot, can be contacted at jasdodson@thepilot.com.