Ammi Midstokke: When a walk will suffice

I’m not sure where I learned that running was a superior method of movement, although I’m highly suspicious it coincided with the end of my brief affair with Gauloise cigarettes.

My assumptions about running cultivated a kind of trail-elitism. The kind that karma eventually gets wind of, or whatever forces of nature exist to teach us humility – like aging.

I put the word “run” on my calendar about five times a week, as if having it written there increases the likelihood of it happening. This has not proven true. Strangely, if I stay home and drink coffee instead, I do not cross out the word and write “lazed-about” instead. If anyone reads my calendars after I die, they will have a fantastic impression of my consistency.

I did not want to run today, but there it was on my calendar among a list of other adult obligations. Remember when we were children and our chore list was full of basic household tasks that could be completed in 15 minutes while complaining? Unless you had farm animals, in which case, you win at childhood labor competitions and being an adult probably feels easy.

The point is, the easiest thing on my list today was “run,” and it turns out that if you call in sick to your life as a grown up, everything just waits for you to get out of bed anyway. It’s not like some fairy appears to clean the house, although I have suggested on more than one occasion that my husband could role-play this while I napped.

Dragging my feet in the dirt, Freya and I made our way down the hill and through the trees in the turning colors of autumnal air. These weeks are a seasonal limbo when the warmth of summer has not acquiesced to the bite of fall and the leaves are merely teasing with a few rusty edges. Everything looks a little spent: Plants are a little ragged and bare, the blossoms have long gone to seed, the lush green has been replaced with a worn-out sage.

The people on the lakes are tired of taking out their boats. There are fewer paddleboards and kayaks on the tops of cars. The mountain bikers make less dust. The fawns are losing their spots and gaining their legs, though behaving like loitering adolescents on the sides of roads. Even the coyotes have quieted their summer symphonies. The huckleberry bushes offer a few sweet berries, overlooked by the summer hikers and greedy bears. And the sun-baked earth waits patiently for the soothing reprieve of rain.

I bludgeon myself up a hill, over a rock. I feel like the sagging grasses and the parched bushes. But I don’t listen to it, the same way I often fail to listen to the nuanced, shifting of sounds with the seasons. The wind in spring blows differently than in fall. Once the leaves are gone, the trees just rattle like the bones of their ancestors. The birdsong carries softer in the thick mornings of summer. Now they are celebrating less, making travel plans more, I guess.

I inquire through my haze of self-pity and suffering seemingly tainted with the burnt melancholy of late summer, What is the most self-compassionate thing I can do?

I say that I could go for a walk tomorrow. Yes, that’s a great idea. Tomorrow, instead of running, I could pour myself a cup of coffee and take the dogs for a walk.

The voices of judgment interject and point out that tomorrow I might feel better, in which case I should not be a slacker. And anyway, I have no reason to not feel well, so I must feel OK and anything less than optimal overachiever thinking is clearly a lapse in my person, a sign of weakness. I’m not sure when society taught us that our well-being is a kind of static achievement and that a slow day must be an indicator of greater cause or at least an opportunity to embrace the neuroses of self.

Moments later, I kick a rock and topple forward. It’s the same rock that took me down last week. Slow learner. Only then does it occur to me that I could walk right now.

If I am of nature, why am I so much less intelligent?

We go outside to get out of our heads. Lord knows the contents of our minds are often not in service of us. How much of our outdoorsing is spent in narcissistic reverie that totally misses the point of nature? Thirty years of running, and I still need to fall on my face to learn to pay attention to the world around me. Maybe this is why my friends with replaced knees are not complaining: Slowing down has a few benefits.

We spent the rest of our run walking and wondering what makes the ponderosas shed their needles this time of year, and marveling at how they make a soft and slick carpet under our feet. Each step smelled like sweet pine incense wafting around us. It was a far better use of our morning.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com.