Just Life| I Went Walking..

It is Sunday morning and we are going for a walk. My daughter is taking her iPod with her. The iPod apparently has a pedometer. So my daughter keeps giving me updates of how many steps we are taking. 

One, two, 100, 250..... 1,000

At one point, she turns to me and says " it says that we burned 16 calories. Is that a lot mom." I told her that unfortunately it is very little.

So we walked for an hour or so, the pedometer recorded 6900 steps. I think by the end of our walk, we burned a little over 200 calories. 

A Hershey's milk chocolate bar has 210 calories.

Darn it. 

I don't even want to know how many calories were in that delicious doughnut that I ate before going to that walk . Lets' just not think about it. 

Anyway,

I love walking. It clears my mind and walking with my daughter gives me some needed one on one time with her.

So, if you are feeling blue, just put on some comfy shoes and go for a walk. 

Here are a few books on  this topic:

• Step by step : a pedestrian memoir

• Walking San Francisco : 30 savvy tours exploring steep streets, grand hotels, dive bars, and waterfront parks

• The lost art of walking

• Fitness walking

 

 

Signing off until next Monday- Panteha

Learning | Awareness

I've been thinking about awareness, ever since a friend recommended a book to me.  

The title of the book is On looking: eleven walks with expert eyes. Think about the places you walk through regularly. How much do you really see and remember, after your walk? 

Cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz thought she was paying attention on her walks, until she began taking the walk with different people. They all see different things, during the same walk around the block, because they are all different people. The artist sees things differently than the urban sociologist, the physician, geologist or the naturalist (he was interested in all of the bugs!)

On Looking inspired me to look more carefully at my own neighborhood, when I walk my dog. My little pug certainly notices our neighborhood very differently. She focuses especially on the smells, particularly on things I wouldn't care to sniff.  I tend to notice the changes in gardens, or the birds.

Thinking of walking reminds me of the mornings when I was in high school in New Orleans. Our school had an open campus--students could leave the premises.  My best friend, Roberta, and I rode the bus over the Mississippi River every morning at a ridiculously early hour for teenagers to be awake. As soon as we got to school, we stuffed our belongings into our lockers, and went "mumbling."  

Mumbling was a term we borrowed from Roberta's father. It meant to wander aimlessly. We walked really fast on the sidewalks of the neighboring streets, talking about whatever was on our minds and laughing. The neighborhood had different architecture than the suburbs we inhabited, so I remember noticing the houses the most.  Many of the houses had crawl spaces underneath them.  

One morning, we slowed down and stopped in surprise. A big dog emerged from a hole in the crawl space under a large house. Then a smaller dog, and another, and so on, until Roberta and I turned to each other, and said simultaneously,"Five dogs!" That gave us a big laugh, and we continued our mumbling way back to school.

I don't know what we would have thought about Horowitz's book, if it had been available to our fifteen year old selves. But it's interesting to realize that we both noticed the same thing at the same time, and stopped to observe, instead of mumble, that morning.