Walking. Strolling. Hiking. Wandering. However you do it, it’s good for your health. Especially when the place through which you roam feeds your soul while you are there.
We are living in a divided age. A third of us are too young to know a time without a personal computer, another third remembers what life was like before its existence, and a final third still needs to learn how the dang thing works. This little box of plastic, glass, mercury, and wires has wedged itself between reality and whatever it is any given human knows is real. Through the virtual, we can now create — complete with emotional responses — almost any world imaginable. Except for the real thing.
To experience true, real time, authentic reality, one must get outside and immerse themselves in a true, real time, authentic experience. The dawn of the computer has made this no less important. You cannot recreate the earth and all that it offers. You make a robot, a clone, a prototype, but you cannot recreate the natural self. And even if you could, it wouldn’t be the same.
Proof continues to be documented in countless studies and articles and calls to action. We need to get outside. We need to put down the electrified possession and move around, pump the blood, rejuvenate the mind, and connect to something that was there long before we — and our computers — were born.
I know it. You know it. We all know it. But do we do it?
Believe me, I understand the many reasons why we don’t. Where we once had a routine of hunting and gathering, we now order and click. We research and network to survive. Sedentary computer time has snuck its way to the top of survival’s priority list.
Meanwhile, as a believer of simple solutions, I love the idea of going for a walk. As long as you are physically able, you can reap the benefits of this exercise that stretches the legs, the lungs, and the heart, and the mind.
Intended to be one part inspirational and one part informative, I am about to embark on a commitment. I will walk. And I will share. Five days a week. One trek a day. Each coupled with a single observation, a thought, a suggestion, or a notification.
Practice and training have begun. I am approaching the starting line. Very soon, I will invite you to join me by connecting to this blog. There you may jaunt with me, down a variety of paths, through all seasons, in most types of weather. Let us connect through the virtual world so that you will be rejoined to the authentic one. From there, you can take the experience for whatever it is worth to you. May it inspire you to walk. May it nourish you when you cannot. May it rekindle your ties to the earth, remind you of your dependence on earth, keep you in stride with the cycles of earth, and inspire you to keep your feet on this earth, for there is where we can touch true reality and light up our unplugged souls. There is where, together, we can go for a walk each day.
