A short walk into wonder

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till its gone?

Image by rawpixel.com

I took a brief, brisk walk today. (By brief, I mean 7 mins including cool down, a distance of, perhaps, 700 metres, as I have ME/CFS.)

It’s a cool and mild late autumn day in Melbourne and I’d been inside all morning, doing some life admin and a telehealth appointment. My walking poles and I kicked up the pace, a bit, on my usual snail’s pace. You know that feeling where you muscles and nerves, your heart and lungs, seem to get into a sync where everything becomes comparatively easy (if a bit huff-inducing)?

Nothing hurt enough to require attention. I swung along, feeling alive, aware of my body with every swinging stride: the pleasant rolling shift of weight from heel to toe, from leg to leg. The poles felt like an extension of my body, swaying with the swing of my arms like benign metronomes, their regular staccato the soundtrack of the moment.

So ordinary and so glorious!

In The Before, I never thought much about walking, I didn’t really notice walking, except to feel a vague sense of failure and shame that I sucked at running. I could, just about, run around a netball or volleyball court (until the rotator cuff tear) or chase a friend down a grassy hill at the park, or gallop for a departing tram, but they didn’t count as ‘real’ running. I thought walking and I would always be there for one another. Weird, because my maternal line features arthritis, but I take after my paternal line, with aunts who played tennis into their 70s, rocking their tiny tennis skirts. I assumed since I had no arthritis that meant I’d have no issue.

Then in 2008, I smashed my arm (my humerus), I worked hard to get my walking back, once I could walk again. An immobilising functional brace for four months, plus whatever (short of bone breakage) the fall off the horse did to my hips and pelvis, made for a long recovery. I discovered, the hard way, that using your arm A) not at all, then B) differently, changes your gait. Turns out your body is a total system and every bit affects every other bit in subtle and not so subtle ways.

That experience made me grateful, to a point, but I was more focussed, then, on getting my dominant arm back (hello ‘cutting up my own dinner’, ‘opening jars’, ‘writing’, ‘knitting’ and ‘cleaning my teeth / wiping my butt the way nature and my neurology intended’). It’s the little things, truly. My walking hiatus was a side-effect, unfortunate, short-lived, and soon ignored, if not forgotten.

By 2009 I could do an 8 mile tramp across the fields, from time to time, and a 3 mile walk nearly every day, if I wanted to. Dear god, I miss walking like that. Me, a map (or native guide) and miles of grassy, gravelly or muddy track for my boots to tromp. Bliss. 8 miles, 3 miles or 300 metres, walking can be a joy if you can do it.

And if you can’t do it, or not comfortably, without pain and/or conscious will, I hope you spend your energy on working out some wheeled mobility, rather than striving for an ableist idea of two legged locomotion as a signifier of being a Real Person. It’s about freedom of movement, and as much autonomy as we can manage safely, not about how we do it, in case you need to hear that today. This love letter to being a pedestrian is description, not prescription.

So, if you are able to, and you want to, take a moment to check in with yourself as you walk about today. Glory in that experience, if you can, or maybe just appreciate it a smidge more than yesterday. Maybe even DO it a smidge more, because you can, while you can. Take a moment because, as I’ve said before, you are miraculous.

Thank you for reading, your time and attention are a gift.

Over to You

• Seriously, pause your mind from its endless hamster wheel of ‘have to’ and ‘should’ to appreciate walking (or your equivalent mobility). Notice the way your body coordinates, or not. Feel your breath. Marvel at being alive, right now, right here, and walking.

• Think about the cultural view you have of those who can’t walk. Do you feel impatient when they slow you down? Do you feel even a little superior when you zoom past? (I, to my regret, have felt both those things, ableism, like glitter, gets everywhere).

• Take some time this week to go for a walk, just to walk. It can be for as little as a few minutes. Try to keep your mind from going to the Hamster Wheel. How does that feel?