I try to go for a walk every day. I have kept my streak going for a while. Sadly, my Apple Watch, which tracks similar exercise-related things, does not tell me how many days in a row I’ve gone for a walk. I could probably dig that information out of the app’s colorful, well-designed graphical user interface, but I just know that I’ve been doing it for a while with very few breaks. The breaks are when I’m sick; not much else deters me.
The health benefits are good; I know that a couple of years ago when I would go for a walk I would quickly get out of breath and that doesn’t happen any more. My heart rate rarely gets out of Zone 1 unless I try to do a little jog.
I have mentally mapped out routes through my neighborhood, keeping to side streets as much as possible. The routes include laps around a park nearby so I can walk on soft grass if I want (or stop at a public restroom or get some water if I need to). I can tailor the routes to be anywhere from 25 minutes long to over an hour. It’s great.
One of the major benefits, though, is the mental break. Especially for the past 7 months, I’ve spent all my time at home, rarely leaving, because I was unemployed. Going outside gives me a new viewpoint, literally, and the habitual movement allows my mind to wander.
Wandering minds are creative minds. Walking, it turns out, is good for thinking.
On today’s walk, as on nearly every other walk, I had headphones in and listened to podcasts. Today’s was this week’s episode of Accidental Tech Podcast, where three friends talk about various tech news and developments, mostly focused on Apple and the ecosystem surrounding Apple products. They do wander into other topics, though, and a frequent one is cars and car news, since the podcast they started first was called Neutral and was entirely about cars.
Casey, in the aftershow of this week’s episode, told a truely astonishing story about a car failure that I do not want to spoil. If you have any interest in cars, as I do, you owe it to yourself to listen and marvel at Casey and his wife’s terrible luck. Everyone is fine, except for their car, an otherwise-bulletproof 2017 Volvo.
Listening to that, though, reminded me of many past car-related stories, and since I’m trying to post something here daily, I realized that I could mine those stories for future posts. It would make a nice break from all the D&D I’ve been posting here lately. Gotta keep up with my theme, which is that I write about whatever the fuck I want and don’t have to stick to any single topic because this is my place on the internet.
I was able to remind myself of that topic by asking Siri on my Watch to remind me about it when I got home. This feature is amazing for me: the act of making the reminder helps me remember, and then getting another reminder when I get close to home helps seal it in my short-term memory, which is otherwise like a fine Swiss cheese.
Look forward to posts about that, and other topics, in the days to come, but for now, I’m thankful I can still move around, and that my body and my mind work together to keep me living a creative life.