Hi, just a quick note before we get into the post. I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who either joined up as a paid supporter or gifted a one-off donation over the past week. I really appreciate your support, so thank you all very much. And a big thanks as well to the people who took part in the CrumbGPT AI Glove drawing prompt. I’ve picked a few out and dropped them at the bottom of the post for anyone who wants to see what powerful AI technology looks like up close.
Walking has been something I’ve slowly come around to. No later than anyone else I suppose. I got very into crawling early on, at least for the first year, before I eventually stumbled onto walking after seeing some of its many advantages.
Once I'd grasped walking, I took it and ran with it. Which is to say that I left it behind and got very into running. I never completely dropped walking, it just became more of a thing I did when I was deciding where to run next. My bedroom, the kitchen, the backyard, back into my bedroom, the lounge room, and so on and so forth. Walking just became less interesting overall. Why would you walk anywhere when you could get there faster?
We never think our preferences will change, but they do. Maybe it was just that I was getting older, or maybe it was directly related to that one time in high school when I ran past a door which someone opened at the exact same time and it flung me into a tree. It's hard to say. Whatever it was though, at some point I found more of a balance again and I started walking a lot more. Not just indoors, but also outdoors. And especially outside doors. It just became much more socially acceptable to do so. Maybe I'd lost some of the magic of childhood? It's certainly possible, but there is also some degree of fitting in we must do, and I daresay it might have been hard to convince people to come and visit me at my house if I was running in and out of rooms constantly.
I didn't give up running entirely. Like many others, running became something I did whilst wearing sports clothes as a way to keep fit and active. Occasionally even training for a fun run. These are generally the accepted conditions under which running can take place if you're an adult: that you must be wearing sports clothes. Have you ever seen someone running towards you wearing jeans? It's normally a pretty good sign that something is very wrong.
And with running becoming more of an activity reserved for fitness, what then of walking? Surely this meant walking picked up the slack again. Coming back in favour as the preferred mode of transport.
I wish that were the case. At least as a young adult, it was the car that took up the slack. I found that walking tended to directly conflict with my values at that point in my life. Values that I felt very strongly about, like laziness and not giving a shit.
Walking was still in the picture. I didn't fully give it up. It turned out to be great on holiday. I walked everywhere and would cover many kilometers every day. Only to come back home and return to car life.
Sometimes I would break out of my routine and go on big walks. There were times when, on a big night out and having spent hours trying to get a taxi, I would decide to walk home despite it definitely not being a walkable distance. Potentially something to do with the amount of alcohol I had consumed. One time, when I was living overseas, I got in a taxi and was appalled at the inflated price I was quoted, and instead decided to walk home to teach the taxi driver a lesson. I'm not entirely certain what the lesson was but I was sure he would regret trying to rip me off and when I eventually arrived home, many, many hours later, he would call me up and apologise and confirm that I had won and he had learnt his lesson. Again, there may have been alcohol involved.
This was a common theme for a number of years. Walking had simply become a secondary thought.
And I'm not sure what the turning point was, but something changed. And I found my way back to walking.
At the previous house I lived in, I had two walking routes. Both took a lot of research and testing. Many tweaks along the way and a fair number of wrong turns. This is how you establish a walking route. It requires feet on the ground and a lot of steps invested before you finally carve yourself out a regular route.
This doesn't mean walking routes are set in stone. The best walking routes are modular, and whilst most of the time I honour the route that I've worked hard to map out, there are plenty of options along the way should I feel the need or want to spice things up. Sometimes I might need to choose the express version if I'm strapped for time, or on other occasions I'll choose the deluxe version if I feel like I want to take the more luxurious scenic route. It's a bit like how you can customise your burger at McDonalds on those screens. You might want to start with the Big Mac, but today just feels like a good day to add bacon to it.
There was one occasion where I made a significant change to one of my regular walking routes when, whilst walking under a tree on the edge of a park, a bird fell out of the tree and onto my head. A young magpie just as startled as me gathered itself and then flew back up onto a branch. I'd wondered if an older magpie was up in the tree giving the young one some guidance in preparation for swooping season. 'Ok that was good, but you want to fly at them rather than fall directly onto their head'.
The weird thing was that the day before this happened, a bee had flown into my head as well. I'm not sure if the bee was texting or something but it was a front-on collision with my forehead. It was only a tiny collision but after the bird incident, it made me extra wary of what animal would be hitting me in the head next. Especially as these things always happen in threes.
It was a strange week and hard to explain. I'd checked myself in the mirror and confirmed that I wasn’t wearing any reflective glass on my head, so that wasn't it. And when I set out again on the same walk, I was extra wary of animals in my vicinity. A few dogs tugged on their owners’ leads as they went past me, no doubt being pulled into the gravitational orbit of my head as the cosmic forces at play sought to complete the sequence of three, but that was about the extent of it.
I eventually returned back to the original walking route, as the feeling of missing that patch of the park eventually became stronger than the fear of another bird falling onto my head. I always remained extra cautious though and every time since then I always took a wide berth of that tree.
This is the thing about walking routes. After enough time you will start building up a collection of memorable points of interest. This is the spot where a bird fell onto my head. Those bushes over there are where a man flashed passers-by during a busy morning commute. And here along this footpath across from the park is where that woman beamed a 'good morning' to me with such joyous energy that it felt like a powerful gust of wind blowing through me.
This was my favourite section of this walking route. Not just because of the positive energy beamed at me that one time, but because it cuts along another park next to a native garden, with huge eucalyptus trees looming overhead that would sway and roll when it was windy. And because of all the vegetation, it would often smell great after some rain or if the sprinklers had been on. If I was wearing earbuds, I would always take them out along this section so I could hear all the whooshing. Sometimes it was only light whooshing, and sometimes it was the whoosh of a joyous good morning, but whichever one it was I made sure I was fully tuned in for it. And regarding my nostrils, they never have any buds of any kind in them so the post-rain smells are free to come and go.
All walking routes have their good parts and bad parts. You should always do your best to remove the worst sections of a walking route, but sometimes it's unavoidable. I occasionally make an effort to be curious and look for interesting things and change my mindset, but then other times I just give up and think 'well, there's nothing to be done about it. This is just an inferior stretch of path'.
I try to remind myself though, that without the bad parts, the good parts wouldn't feel so special. So well earned. I think I enjoyed the whooshing trees so much more because of that shitty street that I had to walk down. I felt that joyous good morning that one time because I really needed it. And I'm so much more grateful when I walk through a park now and a bird doesn't fall on my head.
These are the reminders we need in life sometimes. Hopefully I’m able to keep it top of mind for the next time, but if not, I’m sure life will be ready with a reminder top of head instead.
The glove is impressive! Love the drawing of my cat.