Walking The During Time

My last post was in mid February 2020, in what I sometimes refer to as the Before Time. My posting schedule during the Before Time was a post every two weeks or so at the beginning and middle of the month.  

I was due for a post in early March, when COVID was rising. By the time I was overdue for a post in mid-March, COVID had risen and I was in no condition to write anything. All my emotional energy was spent on Zooms and getting through the day. There was nothing left over. 

In April the smidge of brain space and emotional energy earned by coming to terms with a new-and-hopefully-temporary normal was consumed by doing live streams and the Nature in Place challenge on iNaturalist. As stretched as I was, it was deeply satisfying to see the Earth awake into spring. One year, I may write about it.

But then May happened. May is when the White dominant culture learned about Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and when on the same day, May 25, there was Christian Cooper and George Floyd. On May 26 I wasn't sure that I would ever be able to write anything again ever. 

The human spirit is resilient, though. And like so many other people here I am in early August learning to live through the During Time despite being a quart low on energy, particularly for exploring or feeling like an explorer.

So what I do now is a lot of walking.

I try to walk most days of the week. My goal is 3 miles a day although I don't stress about it. On weekends I do all three miles in a go while during the work week I walk 1.5 miles two times a day. I walk to be outside while I can and not to "waste" the nice weather. The cold and the dark and the icy footing will be back soon enough.  I've missed too many days of fresh air and movement in my lifetime. I am not a greedy person but I want to take advantage of as many as remain to me.(1)

I walk too because I'm taking a break from Facebook and now I have free time. I still have a FB account because when I deactivate it my posts disappear including the ones I've shared on other platforms. Also, there are few people I want to follow so I hop on and look at their posts now and then although increasingly less frequently. I'm feeling nostalgic for the early 2000's when everyone had a blog and we used RSS to aggregate the blogs into a single feed. It was like FB but without the algorithms and advertising. 

Aside: I've enabled email and subscription notifications on this blog just for this very reason. 

I walk because this is my podcast time. Oh, I know. You should do one thing at a time and be fully present with that thing and sometimes I do. But since I'm not driving long distances any more and I'm not the kind of person to sit down for an hour or more just to listen to a podcast, walking it is. My podcasts are heavy on NPR programs and Ten Percent Happier (updated: and Ologies.)

For now, I walk because I like collecting my data on Map My Walk. I like having Coach Hartshorn, the name I've given to the Map My Walk voice, inform me of my distance, total time and splits during each walk. It's an important piece of self knowledge that makes me feel strong and God knows we all need something to make us feel stronger these days. 

I know myself well enough that one day some or all of these factors will no longer have any bearing on my walking. One day it will be the After Time and I don't know what my walking or blogging will look like. But today is not that day. This is still the During Time.

So, I walk.

(1)I'm outside as I write this on the back patio. It's a lovely 65°F and every once in a while I look up at the horizon, across the trees to the national grasslands. The view makes up for the four lane highway close to the house.