I did it. Today.
No, despite being in NYC and bucking the stereotype immortalized in Lou Reed's song, my walk didn't involve plucking my eyebrows or shifts in gender. My walk was the amazing, life-affirming, irrational choice to walk through the park to get home rather than catching a cab or subway after teaching this morning.
Some of you are experts at this. The concept of choosing leisure over efficiency, pleasure over productivity, and active choice over programmatic habit isn't a foreign one. Maybe you're one of the people who have normalized the atavistic function of connecting to ones-self, indulging in the generosity of this amazing planet, or making decisions based on what really serves your highest good. Or maybe not.
Either way, it was a moment of reconnecting to my own wild soul. Wandering the sinewy paths of Central Park, I followed and found my heart. Listening actively with each step I asked my heart what it wanted, which way to point my feet. The still-green of trees were a healing sight for monitor-wearied eyes. The white elk with amputated branches, thriving no less, was a powerful teacher. Weeping in that quiet will-o-the-whisp "will this deepen or will it go away" kind of way, I gave myself more than an hour of asking what felt good, what made me happy exactly in that moment.
Jazz to tin pan, dog walkers to kiddie fitness, I was reminded that sunrise to sunset, behind of the clouds of my worries life persists in all its beauty. If you haven't taken a walk lately, me and a couple billion people on the planet wish you would.
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