I Went for a Walk

On Sunday late afternoon I went for a walk by myself. I'd been on a five-mile hike earlier in the day with Julie and two old friends visiting from central Ohio. The morning hike was birdy and fun: ceruleans and rose-breasts, dogs splashing in the creek. This evening walk (not hike) was just to decompress.

Taking a walk works for me.

I'm not someone who naturally finds time to relax. In fact, I need to make myself take some downtime every so often. The normal mode for me, it seems, has always been go-go-go. I see something that needs to be done and I move to take care of it.

While doing so I uncover or discover several other things needing some attention and move to them. Pretty soon a day is used up and gone. Never to return. Some days I feel a sense of accomplishment—"I got a lot done today!" Other days I'm frustrated at the lack of a measured, linear progression. Those are the days when I feel like a hummingbird flitting from blossom to flower, never staying long in one place, never perching to rest, burning up all the fuel I take in just to keep on flying and eating.

That seems like an expensive, not very centered, way to live.

Adding to my need to find a bit of peace on a meandering walk is the ever-present bombardment of news, social media, email, text messages, push notifications, phone calls. It's head-in-a-blender maddening. Makes me want to find a cave somewhere and pull the boulder over the entrance. I keep looking on Air BnB for a furnished cave but have yet to find one.

I've never been much of a self-help-book reader. A chapter or two and my mind drifts away from the author's arc, no matter how deep and poetic. I mark my place with the best of intentions, close the book's covers (which are usually laden with praise-y blurbs from other self-help peddlars) and almost never return to discover the as-yet-unread pearls of wisdom.

Nope. A walk is what helps me. And a good night's sleep, which is something that is helped by a walk. Breathing deeply on the walk also helps me.

And not watching a gory episode of "Game of Thrones." That reduces the nocturnal teeth-grinding in general. Which leads to better sleep and fewer crowns—though not the Game-of-Thrones kind of crowns. The dental kind. [Hey! Look! I used "dental" and "kind" in a sentence fragment!]

Music also helps a lot, but that's the subject for another blog post. Just saying "another blog post" opens the stopcock on a small drip-feed of guilt for not keeping this blog going. I could make excuses, but who'd buy them? The honest answer is: I was busy going too fast in some other direction and I forgot. Blogs are like walks: it takes time to do them right.

Let's hope it's not too late. After all, it's later than we think.

But first, let's talk a walk...