I Walk
Every day I walk. It’s the best exercise there is (say those who are supposedly in the know.) But I don’t walk for the physical benefits, I walk for my brain. When my body moves, my mind wanders. And the striding conjures up all kinds of things. It summons questions that don’t have clear cut answers… sentences that hold their own alone but are looking for companions… titles of chapters, books, and blogs whose insides haven’t yet congealed. Floating around freely inside my head, words somehow find their sea legs in conjunction with one another while my body moves.
The foremost thought leaders in the world would label walking as my keystone habit. It’s the thing that makes the next thing—the thing I really want to do—more likely to happen. I want to write, and so I walk.
Walking comes with little expectation. It doesn’t stare at me like a blank computer screen. Nor does it document the passing minutes of nothingness like the clock on the wall across the room. It neither pushes nor pulls. It just gives space--and opportunity for observance—a chance to ponder and surmise. Unlike running, when I walk I don’t have to worry about my gait or be distracted by my breathing. My mind is free to graze. And so it does. In and out the doors and windows, my thoughts come and go as they please, jostling around like Plinko chips on the board of the “Price is Right.” Some land in lanes for later retrieval, some others disappear to never be heard from again. And either is just fine. I don’t walk to write, I walk to be able to.
Walking is my ready stance.
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Physical exercise has long been lauded as a jack of all trades. In addition to making our bodies healthier, when we move it clarifies our thinking, boosts our moods, and ignites our brainstorms. Extensive research on endorphins tells us, among other things, that the mind and body work in tandem as helpmeets for each other. After a workout, it is no accident that things just seem to work out better in our heads.
Years ago, I had a player who I struggled to connect with off the court. She wasn’t keen on conversation, with anybody anywhere really, but especially with her head coach in her head coach’s corner office. I had no way of coaching her well if I didn’t know her, and I couldn’t ever know her if she wouldn’t talk. So one day I asked her to go for a walk and the walls came tumbling down. Like Humpty Dumpty’s perch, her defenses crumbled as she walked and talked about what scared her and what fueled her and about her hopes and dreams. I got to know her as a person as we traipsed our way around campus. We never tried a sit down in the corner office again. Instead, we kept a standing date to walk.
Walking helps us make the things we think make sense enough to share.
Daily, when I head out on my three-mile course, my mind shifts to auto pilot before I even get to the road. For the first couple of blocks, it makes to do lists and does a calendar overview of the day, the week, and the month, but then it settles pretty quickly into amorphous Neverland. I just walk and notice things. Not on purpose, but because I don’t have one as I go. My agenda stays at home. Sometimes I eventually write about things that grab my attention along the route, but mostly I just let my brain run free taking me to places I could not have plotted before I laced my shoes up and took off. Walking gives me permission to do nothing. From there the writing grows.