Walk

When I was in college, my best friend and I would walk from his apartment to the coffee shops or bars, often amounting to four or five hours of just walking and talking together. Whether this careless existence was more of impoverished necessity or for enjoyment I can’t really remember, but it was a unique sort of calm before life begins to bludgeon you more thoroughly with responsibility. A time in my life during which everything still felt inspired and artistic. 

And that wasn’t just the alcohol.

Magical things happen when we walk. When we slow down enough to breathe in the smaller pieces of life’s chaos. I remember playing music on a rooftop at 2 in the morning with complete strangers dancing along to the songs. I remember an abandoned building that was partially destroyed and screamed stories of an unseen apocalypse. We even broke into a construction site and climbed a scaffold just to sit at the top and drink Shiner while feeling like complete and total badasses.

I wanted to recapture that. At least in part. See, the adventure doesn’t need to be on the fringes of legality to release those euphoric friends we affectionately refer to as endorphins. Rather, I just wanted to take time away from the work I’ve been doing seven days a week for the last two years and find a state of moving meditation.

I know someone more educated than me is screaming at their screen that movement is antithetical to proper meditation but I kind of like that imagery. An angry monk. A monk that’s angry at me.

So I found a few audiobooks and podcasts and donned my headphones for a dipping of my proverbial and literal toes into the purposeful act of not working. I started small. Maybe thirty minutes around the neighborhood. And when I came back home I returned to the computer and kept working.

I think the key is getting beyond that one hour mark. Chasing the point that you’ve legitimately interfered with time you could be making money and made a deliberate choice to do the opposite.

I decided to listen to a few episodes of this American Life (I’ll link them below for the curious) and just walk until it got dark. The air was getting cooler and the light always seems to look different in the fall and winter, so for the first half of the walk I was just appreciating that golden halo around all of the mundane parts of my neighborhood and enjoying my podcast.

Even the trash cans seemed ripped from a Thomas Kinkade painting.

But it was around the first hour mark that I began to really pay attention to the things around me. The hidden throughway that was too small for a car that connected two cul de sacs near my home, or the basketball goal that was setup behind a fence with its net hanging into the paved alley for the kids to play on something more analogous to a court.

I saw trees that smelled like my first girlfriend’s perfume (Velocity by Mary Kay). I saw children acting out bloody battles with swords and bikes and nerf guns.

More importantly, I saw myself. The overworked and emotionally barren husk that remained in the wake of a twenty something that actually believed that the world was beautiful.

That’s a thing that I used to think about. The beauty in forgotten places.

I continued to walk and listen to some pretty remarkable stories on the podcast. There’s a big park near my home and I decided to make a loop around it. I watched all the families that brought their kids to the playground and the dads that were teaching a few young girls soccer fundamentals. And at about mile 3 I forgot about the work I had left to do and the bills, and the upcoming meetings and the girl I was flirting with. 

Okay, I was still thinking about the girl, but I mostly forgot the “adult” stuff and was able to feel the edges of calm for the first time in a while.

The walk home was euphoric and I found myself turning off the podcast and just walking in silence for a while, trying to breathe in the first whispers of fall and hold onto that fleeting brush with whatever the opposite of depression is called.

So I’m walking more. Chasing the dragon, as it were. That first high from when I was eighteen with a book of poetry and a desire to find the beautiful among the trash of my home town. And it’s working, kinda. So if you’ve been down, and I mean, haven’t we all been this year? I hope you take a walk, a long one, one that takes a dedicated and not insubstantial amount of your evening away just so you can see the sunset in the places you normally only glimpse while driving 35 mph in a 30 to get to the next appointment or obligation or whatever.

And if you really dig it, I hope you find a construction site and bring a few beers and watch the world from a new perspective for a bit. We’re here too brief a time to negate the little things.

Thanks for reading.