walking – Hugh's Blog

Touching Grass

If you spend enough time in the weirder parts of the Internet, you probably know the admonition to “touch grass”. Basically, it is most often used in response to someone who is really out there – who has spent way too much time online and has lost connection with the “real world”, and so someone responds to their wild, inane ideas with the advice to go outside and “touch grass” – to get offline and connect with nature, because they have lost touch with reality.

It’s often used dismissively and somewhat meanly – a way of shutting down conversation. But I think it’s also really good advice.

This morning, my alarm went off at 5:30, like it does every morning. My cat hears it too, and hops up on the bed to make sure that, instead of turning it off and falling back asleep, I pet her instead. I slipped into shorts and my sneakers and sort of shuffled to the kitchen, where I made a cup of coffee and saw the condensate on the windows. I check and it’s 75 degrees and 93% humidity outside.

Some days I listen to audiobooks when I go for a walk, but I’m wrestling with a gnawing low-level problem and need the time to think about it, so instead of putting in my earbuds, I turn off the alarm and head out the door. The humidity slaps me after coming from the cool, air-conditioned house. The chickens in the backyard are singing their “I laid an egg” song, the slight breeze activates the windchimes in our magnolia tree, and the cicadas are singing the song of their people.

My neighbor has put out his trash, reminding me that today is trash day, and so I drag the can to the curb, and begin my walk, looking at my watch as I step onto the road – 5:53 am.

Over the next 45 minutes, I will walk some two and a half miles. I will see the red headed woodpeckers, the mockingbirds, and hear, but not see, the Carolina wren. As I said last week, our neighborhood has feral cats, and I see the ginger tom that I suspect was one of the fathers of our current litter of kittens. I lecture him on his parental responsibilities, and he looks at me with interest, before walking off into a thicket.

As I walk along the small creek, I see a snapping turtle the size of a dinner plate, swimming just below the surface, and am fussed at by a squirrel that I startled. I notice the red buckeyes on the tree at the corner have already fruited – “is it early for that?” I ask myself, and debate looking it up on my phone, but decide to do it later. Truthfully, I will probably forget.

I see other animals that live in my neighborhood – the college professor getting in his car, the physical therapist in her scrubs, walking her dog before leaving for work, the lady with steel-gray hair that always waves at me from her porch does so again, for perhaps the 300th time. The house that had a tree fall on it a few storms back is covered in workmen instead of the blue tarps – a welcome sight for all concerned after a lengthy fight with the insurance company.

As I approach my own driveway, seeing the nearly six foot tall colorful rooster that guards my driveway loom large as I approach, I feel a bit of regret. I’m not quite ready for this time in “the real world” to end. As the door closes behind me, and the sounds of outside – the cicada, the wrens, the windchimes and the roofer’s nail gun – fade away. Today is going to be a good day. Because it already has been.

Weeping this morning as I walked

I still walk most days. I like to swim, but if the sun is shining and it’s not raining, I prefer to walk, even if I have to leave the house at 5:30 AM to do it when it’s comfortable outside. I’ve written a lot about my walks in these pages, but it is probably the single most important practice in my life right now. Roll out of bed, down a cup of coffee, and then 2.5 miles in 42 minutes. Like clockwork.

Sometimes it takes longer. This morning I stopped to see a neighbor’s kitten and to smell the blooms of a magnolia whose low-hanging limbs were heavy-laden with blooms. I know this cuts into the pure exercise value of the walks, but if I can’t play with kittens and smell flowers, I’m not doing it.

Many days, I will listen to an audiobook or, more rarely, a podcast. But sometimes, I need to be alone with my thoughts, and I leave my headphones at home like I did this morning.

Which is why I was weeping this morning as I walked.

I’ve had a lot going on. I know, I know, we all have a lot going on – it’s not just me. But as Thoreau said, I wouldn’t talk about myself so much if there was anyone else I knew as well.

Like many people, the two-year interjection of the Pandemic into my life caused major disruptions. I have friends who lost businesses, changed careers, lost their homes, lost their families, and others who are now just trying to survive.

I know other people who saw their businesses flourish during the pandemic, who sold their homes at the top of the market and retired, who started new businesses, who developed new interests, who met romantic partners as they navigated the world in new ways. For them, the pandemic was the best thing to ever happen to them.

But I suspect that many of us are like me – I had a little bit of both happen. I lost some people, I watched dreams crumble, and I also made new friends and developed new ways to earn an income. It was a mixed bag.

When I was working with people who were experiencing homelessness, I learned early a rule of thumb for knowing who would make it out and who wouldn’t. The people who made it out, who survived, who worked the system and got rehoused were, by and large, the people who talked about the future.

“When I get my new apartment, I’m gonna…”

“When I get the new job, I want to…”

Like that.

On the other hand, there were the 50-year-old men who made sure I knew they had been the starting quarterback in their senior year of high school, or the former soldier or the person who showed you the pictures he had carried in his wallet for 15 years of a kid that was now grown. These people seldom made it.

From them, I learned to think much more about the future than I do the past. But that doesn’t mean I never think about it. Instead, what happens is that eventually I stop moving long enough and then it hits me like a wave, and emotionally, I have to deal with it.

Which is why I was weeping this morning as I walked.

For the last two years and change, I’ve been moving constantly, like a shark that will drown if he stops. Trying to keep my family safe, trying to make money to pay the bills, trying to figure out ways to be useful, trying to learn how to do new things as the old things I knew how to do had become much less valuable in this new pandemic-scarred world.

Maybe it’s the pond and the relaxation that comes as I sit beside it. Maybe it’s that some gambles I took early in the pandemic look like they will pay off. Or maybe I’m just tired of moving.

In any event, it really hit me this morning that a lot of things are just… gone now. People I love. Things I loved doing. Dreams I had. Hell, my whole speaking career. My personality changed. So did my tolerance for bullshit. Friends died. Others moved away.

And this morning, I just found myself mourning it all.

The Buddha tells us that our unhappiness comes from our attachment to a predetermined outcome. That has always resonated with me. It’s not that I’m unhappy a thing happened – it’s that it’s not what I wanted to happen.

And this morning, I just felt all of it wash over me as I walked, alone in my head.

Which is why I was weeping this morning as I walked.

This Is What I Do Now

Content warning: Discussion of weight loss and food monitoring.

In March of 2021, I emerged from a winter of severe depression to face several facts:

I was three months away from being 49 years old.
I was in horrible physical condition, largely as a result of trying to survive a year of what my eye doctor calls the pandamnit.
My Dad had died just five months before from a virus virtually nobody in my state was taking seriously, and it seemed to be specifically targeting the obese and people with high blood pressure.
I was obese and had high blood pressure.
My wife was immunocompromised, and while I am limited in my ability to protect her from this virus, I wanted to do everything I could to make sure I did not die, leaving her behind to deal with life in this dystopian hellscape.

You know what didn’t figure into my decision-making at all? My appearance. These days, my body looks like a Crisco can on top of two tooth picks. I used to be slim and muscly. But I also used to be 19. I don’t expect to look the same way at 49 that I did at 19.

I didn’t want to be “skinny”. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to not die. I wanted to not have the joint pain and diabetes and heart disease men in my family get in their fifties. But mostly, I wanted to not die and leave Renee behind to try to survive in all this.

I’m not telling you what you ought to do. I’m just telling you what I did, and the thinking that got me here. You do you, boo.

Like many folks, I have lost weight before. But they were all “diets”, designed to help me lose weight, with no real plan for what happens after that. But that wasn’t my goal this time: I wanted to live. I needed to change my life.

Actually, that seemed overwhelming. So I decided to do a thing I do when I’m starting a new project: I ask myself what I want the end to look like, and then work backwards. In say, a year, I wanted to be physically active, have lots of energy, and have healthy blood pressure and blood sugar levels. And then I wanted to maintain that for the rest of my life.

I like to eat. Food is important to me, and table fellowship is important to me, so food restrictions that make it difficult to eat with other people and receive hospitality from them are nonstarters for me. Unsure what that would look like, I eventually learned of the connection between my ADHD and food that made me constantly overeat – that my object permanence issues caused me to eat mindlessly, and I had no idea how much I was actually eating.

So I started tracking my food. No goal, just using an app to track my food. I needed more data than I had. It turns out I was routinely eating about 3500 calories a day. Was that good? Bad? Let’s do some research!

Now – I am the first to say that the medical establishment targets and discounts fat people unfairly. I was just looking for data. And according to the medical establishment, people who were my height had better health outcomes on average when they took in about 2,000 calories of energy a day. And people my age tend to have better health outcomes on average when they are moderately active for 30 minutes each day.

So, now I had a benchmark. Could I live on 2,000 calories a day? It took several weeks to get it dialed in, to see what the things were that triggered mindless eating for me, the things that told my body to snack, the things I did routinely (like eating peanut butter out of the jar every night before bed) that set me up for eating more than I realized. I also was reminded that I thrive on routine, so, as an example, once I realized that most of my breakfasts were usually one of three things, or that I tended to eat one of four things for lunch if I was working from home, that became a habit.

For example, ¾ cup of oatmeal, ¾ cup of blueberries, 10 grams of butter = breakfast for 272 calories. It became a habit, and thus, a thing I didn’t have to think about. I was teaching myself to be aware of food in a way I hadn’t before, but I was also teaching myself what a “serving” size looked like.

Growing up, it was a sin to waste food, so you ate what was on your plate. A serving was however much was on your plate. How much cereal should I eat? Well, how much is in the bowl?

Turns out, a serving of Honey Nut Cheerios is more than you think it is, and a serving of milk is too much for that amount of cereal. Just learning to eat actual portions of food was huge in my progress. (1 cup of Honey Nut Cheerios and half a cup of 2% milk is 200 calories, by the way.)

For the first time in my life, I was actively, consciously, eating, instead of passively.

Meanwhile, I started waking every day. A bit more than 2 miles each day, a little more than 30 minutes. After a month or so, it was another habit. Later – much later – I would add swimming and weight lifting into the mix.

I never had a “goal weight”, because the goal was to be healthy, not to lose weight. The nearly 100 pounds I had gained as an adult was because I was taking in a lot more fuel than my body required. If I balanced my energy outputs and fuel intakes, that would sort itself out.

And there is no finish line. This is just what I do now. There are days I eat more than the 2,000 calories someone my size should eat regularly, but other days I eat less, and because I don’t have a goal, I can’t relapse. Some days I get busy and don’t exercise, and it doesn’t matter – because this is just what I do now. It doesn’t matter what I do any one day – it matters what I do repeatedly. I didn’t need a diet – I needed some new habits.

I don’t restrict anything. On my birthday, I ate cake. At Christmas, I ate fudge pie. Tonight, I ate tater tots and chili dogs. (940 calories). There is no such thing as bad food – just food that has more energy or less energy, and I don’t need to store extra energy, so I eat what my body needs, which is about 2,000 calories each day.

Now, because somebody will ask: Yes, I have lost weight – just under 50 pounds so far. It’s been very slow but I don’t care, because the weight is not the goal: My being healthy is. Theoretically, I will lose another 30 pounds or so before my body settles out on a balance between my energy use and 2,000 calories of daily fuel, but it doesn’t matter to me when it happens, or even if it does.

And how’s that coming? Well, I swim about 30 minutes most days, and my resting heart rate has dropped almost ten beats a minute since March. I can walk a brisk pace for miles and carry on a conversation with you the whole time. And this afternoon, my blood pressure was a quite sound 118/64, far better than the hypertensive 155/99 I was at just before the pandemic started. I don’t get extreme headaches after eating any more, and I don’t wake up in the middle of the night craving water or sugar anymore.

I feel good. I have the healthiest relationship with food I have ever had in my life. I feel like I can do this the rest of my life, because I’m not on a diet: This is just what I do now.

My neighborhood

On the 15th day, I’m thankful for my neighborhood.

I love my neighborhood.

In fact, we really bought our neighborhood, and they threw the house in.

Each day I go for a walk through our neighborhood. The walk started as a distraction for the foster son we had living with us at the time, and has since become a sort of spiritual practice for me. I love walking the same path each day, knowing it will take between 40 and 43 minutes, depending on a traffic light or two.

But other times I am distracted by neighbors in their yards, and the pace suffers as the relationships increase. I will always take the time to have a conversation, to listen to a story, to hear their concerns or hopes. I spent most of my life thinking I had to avoid interruptions in order to do my work, until it occurred to me that my real work – the work of being human – was actually found in the interruptions themselves.

I pass by heavily wooded lots, hear the children playing at the elementary school, after rains hear the rushing water in the creek and the occasional speeder on the interstate. I see lots of neighbors walking, and a few running. I do notice that all the walkers are smiling and the runners are scowling, and this confirms for me that I am no longer a runner.

Jackson is a storied place – I live but perhaps ten minutes from the homes of both Medgar Evers and Eudora Welty (albeit in different directions). The only openly affirming United Methodist Church is a 3-minute walk from our home, and I pass by the houses where both a former Governor and the author Willie Morris used to live every day on my journey along what Morris called Purple Crane Creek.

We live within walking distance of 2 grocery stores, 3 gas stations, an independent bookstore, and a bakery. We are a 5-minute drive away from a larger grocery store, 10 minutes away from a Home Depot and a Target. The Elementary school is a block away from our house, and the Magnet Elementary school is also a 5-minute drive.

My neighborhood is diverse – of the 5 lots that touch mine, they are all people of color. My street has retired preachers, college professors, social workers, retired military people, salespeople, a psychiatrist, and whatever I am. I am one block away from mansions, and one block away from 900 square foot cottages.

Our neighborhood has block parties, a Fourth of July parade, a holiday party and loves Halloween and kids.

I remember when we were looking at houses, Renee strongly advocated for houses in this neighborhood, even though the houses here were slightly more expensive.

“That place (where we now live) feels like a neighborhood. The other places we looked at feel like just some people who live next to each other.”

And that sums it up nicely. We love this neighborhood because it feels like a neighborhood, not just a place where some people happen to live next to each other.

A daily walk to everywhere

I am 49 years old. I know, I know, I don’t really believe it myself, but I have checked the sums and they line up.

Part of being 49 means realizing that I won’t live forever. Dad’s death last year especially made that hit home. He was only 21 years older than me – and 21 years doesn’t seem like all that long.

So, among other things, I have decided to take my health more seriously. Back in March, I took up two practices that have had a huge impact on my well-being: I walk every day, and I log my food. I have lost 41 pounds thus far, and while we know that weight is an imperfect proxy for health, they were 41 pounds I needed to lose.

I will talk about my relationship with food another day, but today I want to tell you about my walking.

The whole thing is pretty simple: I needed something that I could fit in my day, that was dead simple to do, that didn’t require new clothes or memberships (because COVID), that I could do at home (because COVID), and that wouldn’t get me in the hospital or have a high chance of injuring me (because COVID).

So I decided to go walking.

I used to be a runner. I ran in high school. I ran in the Marines. I ran 5 and 10K races in my 20’s. And then I got married and life got busy and then one day, I wasn’t a runner any more. I took it back up in my mid-forties, but honestly, it wasn’t fun anymore, and I hurt myself twice. When I moved to MS, it was one of the things that got lost in the chaos.

Which was a shame, because while I no longer loved to run, I loved how I felt having ran. I don’t mean immediately after, in the afterglow of the so-called runners high. I mean, regular physical activity makes my life better. I sleep better, I think better, and my body craves the routine.

Last year in the early days of the pandemic, my 7-year-old foster son and I would go for walks in the neighborhood as a way of seeking connection and getting his energy out. In those early, super scary, yet optimistic days (remember when we thought we could flatten the curve with a 2-week shutdown?), those walks were my salvation.

But this spring, I decided to take control of my health. My pants were super snug, I had been doom-eating all through the winter, and Dad’s death last October had sent me into a depressive spiral. I needed to move.

So I bought some $25 shoes at Costco and walked to the end of the road and back. The next day I did it again. And then again.

After a week I bought a fitness watch, to time my pace. That week I crossed the intersection at the end of the street.

These days, I walk to the dead end of our road, 1.25 miles away, wave at the lady who lives there and is always on her porch, chain smoking while doing something on her iPad while an old furry dog sleeps at her feet, and then turn around and come home. 41 minutes round trip, give or take petting a dog or chatting with a neighbor.

The ritual of it all is soothing. Put on the shoes, set the watch, walk to the end of the driveway and turn right. Some days I listen to podcasts, some days I listen to audio books from the library, and some days I am content to let the neighborhood remix of the birds, traffic hum and leaf blowers sooth me into a sort of hypnotic repose.

One added benefit of having a set route that I do every day is noticing the subtle shifts as the seasons roll through, the buds in the spring, the turning leaves at the beginning of fall, the pears that ripened on that tree on the corner, the persimmons that looked ripe last week but fooled you into biting it, leaving you with its astringent reminder that you can’t eat them before frost, no matter what they promise. The blackberry thicket behind the overgrown crepe myrtle, the mulberry tree whose limbs are *just* out of reach.

It connects and grounds me to this place, too. I know which house has the kids that leave their toys out, the house that supported the last President a little *too* fervently, the house that always has 5-6 wine bottles on the curb on Mondays, the house that has what appears to be a classic 50’s Chevy in their garage, and yes, my friend Beth, she of the chain smoking and the furry pup.

I know that Liz is working on a new renovation, that Evelyn got the water leak fixed, that Kam is doing well in school and that her brother loves to give high fives. Walking this street every day means I notice that people fly around that curve, that the potholes are really getting bad on Meadowbrook and that the abandoned house on that corner has been getting more and more ratty. Because I walk this road every day, I notice it in a way I never would at 45 miles per hour.

All of this local knowledge makes me love this neighborhood even more than I did, and for not the first time, I learn that what is good for me is also good for the world around me.

A Good Walk Shared

I went for a walk this morning. That isn’t unusual – I walk about two and a third miles most mornings, rain or shine, and have done for more than a year.

What made it notable this morning was that I walked with a friend. Normally, my walking is a solitary pursuit, but my friend Jill is wanting to get back in the habit of exercising, and asked if she could walk with me this morning.

It’s a great walk, with gentle hills, through a midcentury neighborhood with ranch houses and mature trees and a creek, with surprises around many corners, like the airstream trailer or the bridge over the creek or the hedge of azaleas that is a wall of pink in the springtime. It is the high point of my day, this walk is, and I was glad to share it with someone else.

As we were walking along, I couldn’t help myself – I kept pointing out things that I was excited about. That live oak, the ways this house had renovated their garage, the unusual plants these people had in their side yard, the vintage car in the driveway. All things I knew to expect, because I have seen them every day for months.

I also took delight in showing her the house that really went all out for Christmas, and the house where you will see a giant inflatable bunny rabbit come Easter, and the house that put up the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag after the insurrection back in January. Sigh.

Really, it almost felt like hosting a tourist in your town – like I was the guide, giving the history of the houses, letting her know where the famous author had lived, I pointed out when we passed the home of the former governor, showed her where the city limits had been in the 50’s.

It was a lot of fun, this playing host. I had not realized how much of this walk I have internalized, how much I had soaked in, how well I knew this stretch, and how fascinated with it I was.

Some things are better when you share them.