Currently I am walking.
Not currently, immediately. Currently, of the time. I’ve been doing it for a month now. I started at 30 minutes and now I’m up to 60 minutes a day, six days a week.
Anyone who knows me knows that this is big. I'd rather chew my own toes than take part in anything that could be classed as 'sport' or require combinations of pony tails and fitness attire.
And anyone who regularly reads me (?) will have noted the eerie silence of an un-updated blog; and yes, it correlates. Although don't despair, I haven't morphed from shlock to jock. I don't smell of carbolic soap or have matching tracky tops and bottoms - my socks don't claim a drawer of their own. But walking is my new infatuation; and it’s probably the only healthy habit I can list in 36 years. It doesn't control me - yet. It’s not taking over my life, but it does take over my mornings – and once I’ve showered, coffee-ed, lunched and done the domestic sundries, it’s time to pick up the kids and sacrifice remaining daylight hours to Hama beads and damage control. Four weeks and I haven't been compelled to write, despite usually being so compulsive.
And I’m aware, every time the computer flicks from its blank-faced saverscreen to its bright-faced get-go mode with pop-ups, rolling news and jumpy alerts like an eager desktop springer spaniel, that I’ve been a terrible writer. I don’t deserve to call myself one. I haven’t birthed anything new recently, let alone nurtured the words that need guidance (so many of them) languishing in a zillion shortcuts on my desktop. I have felt guilty, but I haven’t missed them.
In fact I haven’t been missing anything. My new quick-step regime means that instead of doing the morning trawl through gazillion mega-whatnots of information, I have been charging around suburbs and through parks, whatever the weather (this morning, misty, interesting) noticing everything. Everything real, that is. What started as a weightloss method - I was searching for one that didn't require Lycra, hot yoga or gym memberships - has become a daily exercise in awareness.
I noticed that magpies warbling on their lonesome have a very different song to inter-maggie-coms; I noticed brown-capped mushrooms pushing their way through grass, not turds as one might suspect; I noticed wispy steam rising from the ground as the morning sun burned away the dew; I noticed frogs creaking in the community pond; I noticed that my mind could not focus – thoughts on potential projects (you name it: scripts, books, blog) were constantly quashed by unchained observations: faces in cars – a lady picking her ear, joggers pounding, shy eastern rosellas and bolshy cockatoos swinging madly on hair-thin gum twigs twenty metres up, and the feeling of tightening muscles in my jelly bottom. I didn’t miss a sensation or sight. I felt like life’s cctv.
And yet, my computer is life's cctv, isn't it?
I suppose it’s the difference between real archaeology and speed archaeology (one of my favourite Eddie Izzard segments): he suggested saving valuable time with the use of a JCB. Similarly, while I’m surfing for life on the super-fast laptop I’m getting the computed pizzazz, a removed sensation, but I’m picking up eyefuls of dirt all the time, big downloads of unnecessary rubble. And 60 minutes in sweaty trainers may not offer an insight into sleaze scandals and natural disasters, but every step brushes away pointless distractions, day-to-day irrelevance. Raw, outdoor and unaffected.
Don't get me wrong. I haven't gone goggle-eyed with pantheism or anything. I'm still Google-eyed and dedicatedly so; I feel totally at one with communications technology (despite only having worked out my Classic iPod a month ago). I Tweet, FB, I’m a wowser-browser. But I’ve changed. And not just out of my tracksuit bottoms. Walking has awoken something. And now that I’ve finally forced myself back and powered up, favourites at the ready and coffee precariously close to keyboard, I can feel how easy it would be to slip back into a solely cyber life.
It’s all absorbing. So absorbing that my swivel chair doesn’t even swivel, my eyes reach closer to the monitor despite it being an adequate 19” and my throat’s small cry for quench is still being ignored ten minutes later (coffee now cold). I know that after this post I will flick to see what my favourite columnists in The Guardian and The Times have to say, then I’ll get distracted by a news link, and remember that I wanted to look up online instructions for my Easy-Yo. I will sit as if there’s a tube from my twixt-eyebrow chakra to my computer screen, having attention and energy zapped from my body without so much as lifting a finger. Well, maybe one. A mouse does require a click.
It’s somewhat Matrix-y, isn’t it? And just as distorted. I walked for an hour this morning. An hour - I don't take a watch, but when I got back the clock said so. I couldn’t believe I'd been legs a go-go for such a short time; it's not that I was feeling tired or my pursuit was beginning to drag, just that walking is time-defying, timeless. When doing it for pleasure, you don't walk to make time; you walk to create time. And had I been sitting at my computer, that hour would have gone in a flash. What was that? That was your life, mate...
From a job and blog point of view it’s clear that I have been missing in action. But from the bigger picture point of view (bigger even than 19"), I think I could comfortably state that I’m finally existing in action.
If I could put such elations, revelations, into words, without tripping over myself as I so often do it could be a new NYT Best Seller: Feet, Bathe, Grub (working title). I've never had the discipline to attempt anything longer than a sneeze before, but perhaps my ambling pursuit will improve my discpline; since walking, daily, I'm a better shape, a better mother, a better tolerator, a better sleeper, a better moderator: anything's possible.
Hi Rach,Good to read your back safe and sound, probably drained and as you say jet lagged... though I didn't experience that on my trip, probably too much addrenaline coursing through my body at the time. The shear excitement of a new continent and the flora and fauna, and supposingly the first christmas with my father!
Rachel you have the most Amazeing talent for writing... I could read your very clever words and thoughts all day, and I'm not a great one for reading, though fate sorted that one for me... though today is somewhat a struggle... way too much going on.. some excilerating ,some quite sad and emotional concerning family... but that's family. I must say hearing from you has brightened my day! Settle yourself in first before you ring, as I have to get through this weekend concerning family... should be back on form next week with a bit of luck. Take care you Brilliant girl... look forward to speaking with you in the future.
Barry
x
Posted by: Barry Masters | July 03, 2009 at 06:43 AM