Commentary: Dear Facebook friend: Thank you, sincerely, for adding me to your group, “Between A Walk & A Hard Pace.”
I appreciate your impulse to include me in a positive and supportive environment for people who are on “weight loss journeys.” The dedication and discipline required to transform one’s body rouses my respect and admiration.
Before I became the slightly pear-shaped specimen of middle aged urbanity you see today, I worried when society described me as “skinny” and “underweight” until a doctor said, “Your body wants to be this weight. Just keep eating right, pass on the drugs, and do physical work.”
Long walks, yard work, getting outdoors, playing games, maybe some galloping with a doggy companion or dallying in the woods with a comely swain. This is my doctrine of health.
And I mean health, meaning to be whole. It includes physical health but also happiness, a sense of acceptance of oneself, of being hale and hearty.
At Gabe’s Fitness in Deming, I met people very disciplined about their fitness goals, people who greeted me one spring when I considered allocating some time for the gym. They impressed me with their curiosity and exuberance for being physically alive, kindly sorting me out and then going back to lifting minivans.
My goal these days is to be fully human, in body and mind; to be, as Whitman wrote, “turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding,” for “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch, or am touch’d from.”
These days I find my gym in long, aimless walks.
Some who walk regularly do so with an eye on their Fitbit, counting their steps or measuring their heart rate. To me, this is exercising, but not walking. From advertising to professional training to recreational goal-setting, our lives are packed with cultivation and not enough wilderness.
I agree with Thoreau when he wrote, “I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest.”
Therefore, friend, I feel somewhat out of place in your Facebook group; but I will aimlessly hike these gorgeous Florida mountains with you any time.