Walking

A couple of years ago my doctor told me I had diabetes.  It wasn't out of control, I wasn't really having many symptoms and, as it turns out, I have been able to control it by watching my carbohydrate intake and walking, a lot of walking.  My relationship with walking had a rough start, it was the middle of the summer, it was stinking hot, I put on my mp3 player and went up onto the old railroad bed above my house with my dog and I started walking, and sweating, and trudging up hills and waddling down, and counting the steps until I was done and could sit down.  After a few days I noticed that the steps were getting easier, the hills getting less traumatic, the time spent seeming more pleasant.  After a month, I could jog a little, but not too much because I want to stay on speaking terms with my knees.  After a year, I started to seek out hills rather than avoiding them.  After two years, I went on a pilgrimage to Santiago and walked 75 miles in four days, God willing, after two more years I'm going to go back and walk over 500 miles, and maybe a few years after that I'm going to walk it again, I don't know.
But I do know that I love walking, and not just because I have to, not just because it has saved me from insulin injections and gotten me into smaller pants.  I love it for the thing itself.  I love having my feet on the ground and having to pay attention to the weather and the ground under my feet.  I love the pace, where you can notice things around you and talk to people with you.  I haven't put my mp3 player on in months, I listen to the birds, or my wife, or my kids.
On a beautiful day like today, I think I could just walk forever.  In fact, that's one of things that draws me to things like the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail, the idea that all you have to do, all day, every day, is just walk.  Maybe that seems like work to some, maybe it seems like torture to others, but to me it seems like shangri-la.
As much as I like my cars, as much as I "need" my cars, I also have this little voice that sings a delightful song of what the world would be like without them.  I don't mean just that I didn't have one, rather I mean that no one did, that the entire nature of our society was changed back to a world that was governed by the distance one could reasonably walk.  Where pleasant footpaths replaced crowded bands of asphalt and you actually had to talk to your neighbors as you went about your business.
Maybe I've just been immersed in too much Tolkien, but I seriously wonder whether all this range and so-called freedom we enjoy in the world of the automobile is honestly making people happier and healthier.  I think of Huxley's dystopian vision of A Brave New World, quite a bit.  In the end it seems he was much more correct than Orwell about exactly how things were going to go awry: medication, entertainment and mechanization, have become our oppressors rather than a totalitarian state and endless war.  For Ford's sake, he even used the inventor of the mass produced automobile to replace God, it's just eerie.
Walking is an act of rebellion against the machine.  It reminds me, if only for a short time each day, what human beings are made for, how we're supposed to move through the world, how we're supposed to pay attention to things rather than just whiz right by them.
I started walking because it is good for my body.
I keep walking because it is good for my soul.