10,000 Steps a Day: Walking My Way to a Spring of Hope

"But I would walk 500 miles, And I would walk 500 more, Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles, To fall down at your door...."  

--The Proclaimers, 1988

Ten thousand steps. Every day.

That’s my personal goal for keeping hold of my sanity and for getting off my duff, in these cold days of late winter. In these days of distance and dystopia.

That’s not an arbitrary number: it actually comes as a challenge, courtesy of my Fitbit fitness tracker, an electronic watch-like device affixed to my left wrist, 24/7. It tracks every single step I take; from the moment I put my feet down on the floor by my bed in the dim light of morning, to the moment late at night when I lift those same feet one last time at day’s end, and go to sleep.

It tracks every single stride. Not one left out. Not just the steps that are good for me but also the steps that reflect both the mundane (34 steps from my Lazy-Boy to the upstairs bathroom), and the weight gain (42 steps to the bread box that contains a tempting bag of sour cream and onion potato chips and 40 steps to the freezer with black cherry ice cream calling out my name). And yes, there is a direct correlation between the abundance of calories I’m now habitually consuming daily, and my need to get moving and get going and get up and get walking. I’m trying my best to push back against my stress eating and the resulting pandemic poundage.

The daily walks are helping. 

I wish I could say I’ve always been a walker, a strider, a perambulator, those hardy and hustling souls who are perennially outside and moving: the dog walkers and pods of retirees and urban dwellers and annoyingly cheery fitness fanatics, folks who have always walked. Until this winter of our shared discontent, walking to me was a necessity only to get from the house to the car, into work, then back to the car and back inside, with side trips to the grocery store and Starbucks. Nor am I a lover of winter, am instead actually somewhat of a winter wimp, even after having lived in these chilly northern climes for six decades now.

But this winter and spring? I have to walk. I must walk. I will walk.

I walk to clear my head after staring at my Zoomed up computer at the dining room table for hours on end.  I walk to talk to God, to share with my higher power the highlights and lowlights of my life and to ask for help. I walk with my faithful friends, Jill and Kacey, and with my brother Ed, every week, to get some desperately needed time with living, breathing people, face to face. To just hear the sound of a live spoken voice, to unload on someone else about how frustrated I am with social isolation or how challenged I am with work or how sad I am that I can no longer see so many folks whom I love or how glad I am just to see someone. 

I walk to remember how beautiful this time of year is in New England: with its sharp and blue skies and the sound of snow crunching underfoot, everything else so quiet, so sacred, still. I’ve walked through the woods in teen temperatures with a brisk wind blowing, biting at my cheeks. I’ve walked in a delicate snowstorm, oversized puffy white flakes descending, as if from heaven, a gift from the Creator of all that is good. I’ve walked past a donkey named Jonah at a trailside farm in my small town, he and I exchanging glances as fellow creatures. I’ve walked more in the last ten weeks than in the last year.

Who knew that something as simple as putting one foot in front of the other 10,000 or more times a day, could be so good for the mind and the body and the soul?

There is something mystical about walking. We somehow connect in our primordial bones with all of those ancestors who came before us. The farmers who walked their fields, among budding crops, as their daily work. The kids who walked to school balancing book bags and then stopping off for penny candy at the corner store. We even walk with the hunter gatherers, long, long ago relatives, they who walked and who ran for survival.

We were born to walk, to live a life marked by self-created motion, from the miraculous moment when our parents cheered us on as we took our first few halting steps, to the final time we will walk in this life, grey haired, leaning on a cane, ready for one last journey back home, to the power that makes all life.

And so, I walk.  Keep moving ahead. I stay on the trail as I dream about warmer days and warmer walks and a warm spring not so far away, a season that carries within it the hope of a new world being born.

I’m not there yet. But I’m on the way. I hope you are too.