I laced up my shoes, slathered on my sunscreen, grabbed my visor and sunglasses. Then I hit the “Outdoor Walk” button on my Apple Watch and strode forth.
My intention was to polish off a productive day with a good, fast trek, the last item on my To Do list. And so off I went, arms pumping, heels striking with bone-building vigor, breathing in the fresh air of a spring afternoon.
At the rate I was going, I figured I could rack up a mile and a quarter in the 20 minutes I had before feeding the dog and cat (they don’t agree on much but they both take dinner time seriously).
I was off to a great start. Maybe I’d make a mile and a half, which is roughly the circumference of our entire neighborhood.
Two doors down, a neighbor’s new Weimeraner came bounding up to the fence, desperate to say hello. Naturally I stopped for some through-the-fence puppy love. As my hands were beslimed in delerious dog kisses, the pup’s owner emerged from his house.
I haven’t had a chance to talk to this neighbor much. I knew he’d been caretaking his wife, who was stricken with progressive vascular dementia and loss of mobility due to a stroke.
It turns out his wife died a few months ago. He is clearly grieving but also relieved. “She didn’t want to live like that anymore,” he said. Having seen loved ones through similar slow, relentless declines, I understood. We talked about life and loss and moving on.
The puppy was more or less prescribed for him by his adult children, the widower explained. “They said he’d be a distraction,” he said with a wry smile. “He sure is that.” By the time we were done chatting, the neighbor agreed to a standing invitation, puppy included, to join my husband and me for our patio cocktail hours, which we observe religiously when the weather permits.
My Apple Watch asked if I was still working out. I ignored it. A bit further on, two girls, probably eight or nine years old, were staffing their home-made snack stand. They asked me if I wanted to buy a lemonade or some cookies. They were raising money to buy a new scooter. They had a plan all worked out to share the scooter, which they explained to me with the zeel of entrepreneurs pitching a startup.
Luckily I had enough quarters in my pocket.
Thus refreshed (and charmed), I hiked off at speed — for about another fifty feet. At that point I saw a woman across the street, tiptoeing in bare feet along the sidewalk, peering cautiously into the branches of a tree in the next yard.
My curiosity piqued, I slowed down. Then I heard a deep, ominous buzzing. I crossed the street, cautiously. “Is that a bee swarm?” I asked the woman in a semi-whisper.
“It is,” she said, “and I can’t believe how fast it happened. I was just out here an hour ago and there wasn’t a bee in sight.” We spoke — in hushed voices as the instinct not to provoke a horde of bees is a powerful one — and I learned she’d alerted the neighbors, who’d called in a bee expert. We agreed that bees are good, yay bees, but too many of anything tiny, especially when equipped with stingers, is disturbing.
Prudently, I recrossed the street and resumed my pace, until I saw a friend of mine coming toward me. She was walking her sweet springer spaniel who always wants to say hello.
And so it went. It astounds me how our neighborhood bursts back to life this time of year after the winter torpor, a phenomenon too good to miss.
I returned home eventually to two agitated animals, incensed that their evening meal was forty minutes late.
I hadn’t gone a mile and a half or even half a mile. I’d barely made it the length of a football field, and my Apple Watch was not impressed.
But I felt great.
One of my go-to podcasts, which I highly recommend if you’re a curious type, is Alie Ward’s Ologies. The episode I’m listening to now is “Salugenology,” which is a deliciously arcane term denoting the study of what makes people healthy.
And not just healthy in terms of acceptable physical and mental functioning, but truly healthy — whole, resilient, and able to thrive.
A salugenologist, were you to encounter such an individual and I hope we all do the next time we’re in a doctor’s office, is far less interested in what’s the matter with you than in what matters to you.
There’s much more to unpack, but one of the main points the guest speaker, Julia Hotz, journalist and author of “The Connection Cure,” makes is what salugentology science reveals are the essential components of human thriving: movement, nature, art, service, and belonging.
Notice there’s nothing listed there about steps, reps, calories, or grams of anything. As an inveterate tracker of all that stuff, this is very good for me to get straight.
And it makes sense that my hour-long, wee block-circling walk was so satisfying despite how far short it fell of my initial goals: it ticked at least three out of those five crucial boxes. I might not have been in the orange zone cardio-wise, but I was moving (mostly), in nature where the sun was shining, the birds chirruping about their summer plans, and the flowering trees were showing off their best looks.
Better yet, I felt a deep sense of connection: to my surroundings (so much more pleasant and life-affirming than the news media would have us believe) and to my fellow creatures
therein: my neighbors, acquaintances, friends, their dogs, the birds.
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