I’ve been in pain for several months, courtesy of my back. So I visited my doctor, and after she defined the problem, I gritted my teeth:
No biking or running?
“Not for a while,” she replied.
But you can still walk.
So now I’m walking. Not that it’s bad, mind you. I’ve done it all my life. In elementary school, I would run home, ditch my books, and wander out the back door of our rented house, traipsing toward the overgrown river bank with its brambles, red-winged blackbirds, snakes, and toads. I was walking, but it was a subcategory of ambling. I explored— stopping, running, observing. Could I really cross that fallen tree, the one that spanned the streamlet? It looked a little mossy, but if I just kept my balance…
In my 20s, newly married, newly fathered, newly graduated, and completely unemployed sans car, I walked the two miles from our apartment to my wife’s college, our daughter strapped to my back. Sometimes, to surprise the toddler, I would skip for a few steps, her giggles bubbling behind me, the pressure from her legs pushing into my shoulders. My daughter’s giggles protected me from the yawning monster behind me, the one that whispered about family support, about failure. The creature couldn’t drown out my daughter’s giggles on our treks.
Eight years later, I was walking again, this time to combat the nausea from radiation. Those walks, shambling movements down the street, up the hill, around the cracked sidewalk, and back down the potholed macadam— those walks were an assertion. The cancer wouldn’t keep me inside.
Now, my bike and running shoes forbidden, I pad along the sidewalks one more time. My back still hurts, but I’ve returned to those half-understood lessons from the past four decades: walking, that most pedestrian of exercises, is about exploration, protection, assertion.
Plus, it gives me more quality time with my dog.
Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.
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April 1st, 2009 at 8:34 pm
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