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Walking
and Thinking
Today
I took a walk. I take a walk a lot of days. I live in a suburban
community where everybody walks. They have dogs they must
walk. They have kids they must air. Or they are old enough
that they must walk to stay relatively healthy, relatively
young, relatively thin and relatively supple.
I fall in between the airing-my-kids and maintaining-my-mobility
category. I’m just the person who is too old to have toddlers,
too distracted to go to the gym when it’s sunny and too congenitally
cold to walk a dog.
So I just walk. Because I know it’s good for me.
However, I’m not a very good walker. I have to steel myself
to do it. Because I don’t like doing things that aren’t really
doing anything. When I walk I feel as though I should
be going someplace. And often enough, I am: I’m going to the
grocery store, the bank, CVS, the wine store. But the fact
is, other times I’m not always going places. I might be going
in circles on these tidy suburban streets. Or I might be going
up and back on the bike path, ceding the right-of-way to stone-thighed
cyclists or just to your average couple out to burn some calories
and use their lungs.
Sometimes I walk because it’s a way of keeping me from doing
other things I’m supposed to be doing, like balancing my checkbook
or doing the laundry. Fortunately I don’t live close enough
to a Laundromat that I could walk to it. Otherwise, I’d have
no excuses for my procrastination.
I’ve heard people talk about walking meditations. In fact,
staying at a retreat center one time, I saw a bunch of people
doing some Zen walking meditation. It involved them looking
tres, tres serieux and putting one step gingerly—OK,
mindfully—in front of the other. They moved very slowly.
There was no chance that they were going anywhere: not the
bank, not the Laundromat, not the grocery store.
That is not the kind of meditation I would want to do. In
fact, meditation and I aren’t best friends. I get too bored.
My teeming interior mental life won’t quiet down as I review
and reflect on life’s obligations and quandaries. So sometimes
when I walk I count. What am I counting? Steps, I guess. But
then, somewhere in the 70s or 80s, I get bored and my mind
reverts to thoughts of national significance—what a lout Ben
Roethlisberger is—or personal importance—do I really want
to buy a pair of those shoes that look like toe socks and
really aren’t very flattering?
Often, when I walk I phone people I know and love.
Though there are a select few of those I know and love, I
mostly don’t like to talk on the phone to anybody. Ever. I’m
not a phone person. But when I walk, I’m able to talk on the
phone. I think it makes me feel as if I’m going somewhere.
Even if I’m going in circles.
But today, when I walked, those select few I know and love
are busy not answering their phones.
I completely understand what it means to be busy not answering
my phone.
And so I walk in silence, going nowhere, with no destination,
no errand to accomplish.
Suddenly, and in spite of myself, I notice I’m not aimlessly
counting. Nor am I mindlessly thinking about how I really
ought to learn about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol
with little intention of really doing that.
Suddenly I’m having what I can only call a mini-meditative
experience.
It is very quiet as I walk. I notice the flowers in immoderate
and early blossom. I notice a cardinal—a male, it must be—flapping
along ahead of me. He seems quite fearless as I approach and
I assume there must be a well-stocked bird-feeder behind the
stand of hemlock into which he disappears, all red flounce
and fleetness.
I cross a major street that is, for reasons unbeknownst to
me, closed until May 10. So there is no traffic. Which means
there is near silence. I walk across the street and look into
the windows of houses still too full of sunlight to admit
my gaze. When you walk at nightfall, you can look into the
houses of other people and glimpse a way of life different
from your own life. But in the late afternoon, you can’t see
inside—the houses are mute facades that leave you with your
own thoughts instead of musings about the fortunes and misfortunes
of other peoples’ lives.
I walked around the edges of a small park and heard the wind
as a soft whisper in the otherwise still and silent air. And
I stopped in front of a blossoming lilac bush, lowering my
head into the cloud of purple aroma. And eventually, I made
my way back home, calmed, quiet, not willing to go back inside
right away, not wanting to answer the question “So how was
your walk?” because I’m not quite ready to say, “oh, it was
very meditative, my walk.” Even though it really was.
—Jo
Page
graepage@yahoo.com
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