How I changed my Walking Habit

I took one sabbatical and walked parts of the Appalachian trail, another shorter one on the Via de Santiago de Compostela. I had a habit as a walker, a passeante, a flaneur. 100 blocks up Broadway was my ritual for decision making. I got mad at my phone when it told me I walked less week than last week. The pandemic changed me from a destination gal to a process-ional one. I stopped counting steps, stopped my childish back seat wine, “When are we going to get there?” and relaxed, a word not formerly in my vocabulary. I started to trail.

On my enforced sabbatical, the future kind of disappeared. It went remote. It became Posthumous. Destination disappeared. Just walking replaced it, for me. I went from strong aim to aimlessness, from purpose driven to puzzled by purpose.

All the things that were on the bottom of my regular lists moved to the top. Family instead of job. Cooking instead of take

-out. Taking the long way home rather than the quick way home. No need to rush, because where was I going anyway?

I like the word trail because it rhymes with the word grail, and grail is my best word for God. Grail was often ignored in my haste and urgency for the most convenient route, even if it was ugly. GPS governed me.

Grail is the trail at the bottom of the bottom, the one that exists no matter how fast, or slow…