Some days I hate my body and my mind.
They whisper, “We’re tired.”
And I yell back, “FUCK YOU.”
But on other days, I walk.
I walk miles and miles instead of taking the car or all the other machines with wheels around me.
I walk and walk and come home at night and scribble in my agenda about how grateful I am for these healthy legs, these full lungs, for right now.
I know that some day, the inevitable stiff knees that I’ve watched everyone before me succumb to, whether they worked in the fields or sat in an office chair, might come for me too.
I know that a momentary slip and a broken hip might leave me stuck in bed forever, or that tomorrow it might be just feel too hard to stand up even if I’m not broken yet.
And so today, I walk.
I know that definitely, in not too many months, the blizzards and ice will come again.
That just because I know how to walk now doesn’t mean I won’t have to learn again.
I watch how a neighborhood over and across the world it doesn’t feel safe enough to walk.
I try to stand up from the grass and worry that I can already feel the stiffness creeping. And Google if I can still dance if it does.
I walk for me in fifty years who might need to spring for a Lyft (or whoever’s running the autonomous pods by then).
I walk for those who can’t leave home.
I walk for my Earth, telling myself that even though the tiny sigh of carbon that I’m saving isn’t nearly enough, at least I’m connecting with her through inches of rubber and miles of concrete.
I could add up how much I’m saving on a bus ride or how much I’m losing by walking instead of working.
And then compound those both ways, losing on credit or gaining in my bank account.
I could track the calories I burn or the ones I gain from that inevitable pizza slice I grab from a hole in the wall spot.
The micrograms of Vitamin D I’m getting or the nanometers the sun is adding to the fine lines on my face.
The inches on my waist or the words I jot down in my phone at crosswalks or the emissions I’m avoiding, because sometimes, blessedly, the things that are good for me might also be good for my planet.
Sometimes it’s all aligned.
Sometimes nothing I do will help.
But today I can walk. And so I also walk for me.