My Five Daily Miles

I did my five miles today, as every day.  This is a discipline I have embraced for the past couple of years, since I began losing some of the excess weight I put on in my fifties.  I have always been a walker, sometimes covering a distance of up to twenty miles in a day, but usually between five and ten.  When I learned about the ten thousand steps every day, or five miles, I was sold.  I have since made a discipline of walking a minimum of five miles every day.  This is not always easy given that I work almost full time so I have to carefully splice in my walking time throughout my day.  It isn't as difficult as it might seem.  I often walk at least partway to work and always find time to put in another two, three or four miles of trekking through the day, walking between assignments, or during breaks, and often partway or the complete distance home.

I don't think this is going to give me a splendid physique and I really don't want one.  It does help me maintain a healthy weight, as well as assisting in gradual weight loss.  It helps me think, pray, reflect.  I often sing while I walk, and I certainly notice a lot: houses, gardens, flowers, trees, birds, squirrels, other people, their pets. At times it is transcendent.  I would even call my form of walking long distance yoga.

Walking is hugely underrated.  It isn't fast and there is nothing sexy about it.  It is the most humble and most completely natural form of human transportation.  Us walkers are always getting short shrift.  We get in the way of joggers, cyclists, skate borders and roller bladers, none of whom even belong on the goddamn sidewalk.  It can be hell for us sometimes on shared forest trails, like the ones on the North Shore were an old woman booby trapped a mountain trail to slow down mountain bikers.  Of course the lion's share of the sympathy goes to the cyclists.  They are young, strong, fit, fast and have sex appeal, or sort of I guess.  Who really gives a rat's ass about frumpy old walkers anyway?  I also run into the same difficulties in the Pacific Spirit Park trails where I like to hike, but I don't make booby traps and no matter how annoyed I get at the faster young people I still try to get along or at least peacefully coexist.  Life is short, eh?

There is one feature of walking that always goes unnoticed.  It is subversive.  It is revolutionary.  It is saying no to cars and fossil fuel consumption.  Walking is saying yes to going forward gently and in a spirit of humility.  There is nothing about walking that appeals to consumerism unless you want to buy a pair of overpriced sensible shoes and the best Nordic poles on the market.  But for most of us who walk, it is truly the most naked and invisible way of getting around.  It flies in the face of capitalism.  There is no competition, no drive to be the best, no urge to get rich.

Those of us who choose to walk will become a revolutionary force and we are going to transform the world, one footstep at a time.