On Walking

And not walking

Feet, Vincent Van Gogh, 1885

There’s a problem with my right foot, a tiresome, uninteresting glitch that’s keeping me from walking. After an unfortunate gardening accident (true story) and an old, improperly rehabbed ankle injury, I have been hobbling through the season, waiting for it to get better on its own. It didn’t. It won’t. Each step hurts, more steps hurt more, all summer long. I’ve started PT and am dutifully avoiding daily walks, but this new, sedentary reality is messing me up.

I began the ritual of the daily walk more than a decade ago, in the early days of perimeno hell, and and am convinced that it kept me from complete disintegration. Total annihilation. Utter madness. The lady I pay $80 to stick pins in my body told me to get out of my head and into my feet. I listened and it saved me. I walked every single day, up and down my rural road. On the local trails, into gorges and around fields. Down the cow path, which is really an old railroad bed but the adjacent farmer had a habit of dumping his dead cows in a pit by the path, so we call it the cow path. A summer walk there was occasionally accompanied by the sharp smell of death and the darkly comic sight of four stiff bovine legs sticking up in the distance. I would seek another route on those days.

Walking was my therapy, an absolute necessity. No destination, the goal only sanity and the indifferent embrace of nature. Something about intentional outdoor wandering, regardless of weather, location, or mood, throws open the doors to the boarded-up, inaccessible spaces inside me. It lets the air in and the crazy out, a sort of feng shui for the psyche. It untangles the seemingly permanent knots, loosens the worst brain snarls. Even the bad walks — fighting the elements or your walking partner; arguing internally with a nemesis; dreaming up the thing you should have said; worrying about the knee, feeling a little dizzy — even those slogs had value. I’d get home and check the box, sure in the knowledge that my lungs were happy, my brain was swept of cobwebs, and my blood was flowing more easily. Walking always, always, made me feel better.

Until it didn’t.

Now I sit. I pace gently, indoors. A little yoga on the floor, mostly sparing the broken wheel. I do the PT exercises and hear from previously dormant muscles. Calves are a new thing. This is unsustainable. If you can’t walk and think, then all you can do is sit and think, which is somehow infinitely worse. I’m a little bit losing my mind (which may explain why I sort of love the off-kilter structure of that sentence).

My walking won’t solve anything *out there* where the world screams crisis and the anxieties are insurmountable. But it does help *in here* where the rage babies tantrum and understand nothing. It calms them and provides perspective. Look at the clouds. Feel the wind. Watch the mud, marvel at the color. Feel the body sort of working even though this morning it felt like it might never again. Even the cow, the stench and the sadness, the proximity to death and the weird habits of unfathomable farmers — even that helps *in here.*

Earthlings are such weird, fucked up little creatures. We are destructive, cruel, clueless and selfish. We’ve gotten so far from nature, and our nature, and each other. Perhaps walking will lead us back to something good.

Today, I know nothing but this: We are a gruesome tragedy. The world is beautiful. My calves hurt. I desperately need a good walk.

👣 Lisa

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Things to share:

• 🎉 I want to shout about my friend Mary Wilkinson’s perfect book, Quotidian, just released by Reflex Press. This was truly the best book I’ve read all year, a brilliant meditation on a woman’s life, a tale of rooms and the ominous threat of madness that lingers in them, in the middle of a life. Gorgeous, evocative writing that still has me under its spell. 🎉

• I just read — and loved — The Electricity of Every Living Thing by

  Katherine May
  . An honest, beautiful account of walking in the wild and coming to grips with one’s complex and shaggy self.

• More fab books about walking: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn; Wild by

  Cheryl Strayed
  ; Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

  “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.” — Rebecca Solnit