Walking

Time to get moving.

Walking is the best possible exercise.  Habituate yourself to walk very far.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Cloudy day

I read a really long piece on Facebook this morning about self-care.

It starts:

Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

~ Brianna Wiest, Thought Catalog

There is more to it and if you’d like to read the rest, you will find the original here (at Thought Catalog).

A glimpse of the Mystery Woods.

I sometimes forget that self-care isn’t just about the soak in the tub or sitting in the comfy chair reading a good book.  Self-care can be work, a lot of work.  It can be going out for a walk when the weather isn’t quite what you’d like it to be, getting up early for yoga and meditation, an hour or two in the kitchen prepping vegetables for healthful meals.

So, in the spirit of self-care and in keeping with yesterday’s post about training for long walks, I’m going to post occasionally about my walks.  Photos will be limited to three and they will be taken with my phone since I will not be carrying the big camera with me on what I think of as training walks.  The accountability will be helpful.

I walked for a mere 40 minutes this afternoon and my mileage was about 2 miles.  I would have gone longer and farther, but it began to rain.  Not just any kind of rain, either.  Frozen rain.  It was not on the radar before I left and it wasn’t predicted, but it’s still icing up outside.  Somebody got that wrong when they predicted the weather for today.  That’s okay.  It was a start, and a good one at that.

Setting out for my walk.
(The unedited version of the first photo.)

Be good, be kind, be loving.  Just Be.  🙂