From the swamp to the ocean

I spent Thanksgiving with the in-laws and associated family who live deep in the hinterlands of Florida, just a mile from the hard edge between suburbia and wilderness. Staying there makes me sad, I’ll make no bones about it. Nobody moves very much at all, and all the food comes from bags and boxes, and the there are veritable dunes of sweet junk accumulated in various places around the house, which the kids consume at all hours of the day. Not just on Thanksgiving. All the time. Much of day-to-day conversation is taken up by what’s on sale where. Perhaps understandable because they are so barely hanging on economically, having painted themselves into small corner via revolving credit, car leases and no retirement savings. So much fear, barely kept at bay with Xanax and Wellbutrin, and a reluctance to accept it or address it. I try not to judge. Self control comes easy to me, generosity is a bit harder. I try to see my in-laws as heroic but tragic figures within a larger game they haven’t quite figured out how to control. I wish I could figure out how to connect. They think I’m odd and a bit nuts. I probably am, in my own way.

But that’s why I get so restless there. After just a day I’m yearning for escape. In my self-tracking days I used to just wander for miles and miles through the de-peopled “communities”, along the strip malls, trying to make up my daily distances, six miles, seven miles or even eight miles, trying to control what can’t be controlled.

Now that I only walk for pleasure I decided for something more ambitious and perhaps symbolic; to walk from the swamp to the ocean, which happens to be 14 miles. The purpose of the walk was not only to shake off the mental confinement of being trapped between kitchen and couch, but to look at the Sunshine State from a pedestrian perspective rather than from a minivan or SUV, and perhaps impress upon those nieces that the world doesn’t end at the bottom of their cup-de-sac, that there is a way out.

Here are some of the pictures from that epic walk, which took me just over three hours:

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I know the images are pointedly melancholic and not at all how most people experience South Florida, but that’s how it feels to me. I only saw a handful of pedestrians on my walk. Like, a few people standing on the sidewalk with boards announcing bargains. Some unexpected shared humanity there.

Needless to say everyone thought I was crazy, even crazier to take the bus back, but on that bus, humming with conversations, I felt I was somewhere, a real place.

The rent is too damn high

That’s actually the name of a political party here in New York; yet another reason that makes me love this city, though I must admit I’ve never actually voted for it.

Reason I’m writing this, is I’ve been musing on a concept brought to me my a lovely Facebook commenter, who stated

“I found myself “healtifying” myself into a frothy quandary, although it did not feel obsessive or harmful to me in the middle of it. I looked at me being diligent, caring for myself, protecting my health, just being inquisitive. I would not have told you I paid much mental rent on all this stuff, it seemed I paid more mental rent without it.”

That’s exactly how I felt about my many health-related behaviors until recently. I knew I was devoting a fair bit of time and brain space on tracking, on analyzing the data, on reading health blogs and newsletters, on exercise, and just generally thinking about all things health-related. I used to think of it as this slightly nutty hobby, perhaps a bit over the top but mostly a good thing, since anything to do with health is good, no?

And then I did the ultimate Quantified Self meta-analysis. I analyzed how much time I’d spend on an average day on all that stuff I just listed:

– Logging, tracking, downloading and analyzing step, sleep, weight, energy expenditure, calorie, money, mood and activity data:  20 minutes

– Following a gazillion health related blogs, sites, Twitter and Facebook feeds: 20 minutes

– Exercise including walking beyond what I would have normally walked: 90 minutes or more

– Just generally thinking/obsessing about my health, what I’m eating, what I weigh, tracking: 20 minutes

Even if some of this is taking place consecutively, we’re talking over two hours a day.

That’s the rent I’ve been paying on this crazy obsession.

Well, there is an opportunity cost to spending over two hours a day on thinking and doing health-related stuff – namely, all the other activities I could have done or thought about instead. Two hours a day is 1.5 months a year, assuming a 16 hour day. Now, I’m not saying all this time was wasted – doing exercise is generally a good thing, and occasionally thinking about your health is probably wise. But even a month spent learning a new skill, with my family, studying, reading or who knows what else would have yielded greater dividends.

This is an art installation by Darren Almond, an English artist and photographer, that I saw well over a decade ago, but it stayed with me.

It’s a giant clock the size of a shipping container. Every second a number flips down, just like with a much smaller alarm clock. While it looks rather mundane in pictures, it is as an installation quite haunting. The numbers turning over create the relentless noisy drum beat of time passing by, of a countdown to some unknown end, an urgency to hang on to time that’s evaporating in front of you.

You only live one life, so be careful who you are paying rent to.

The art of walking

“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

I’ve been a walker all my life.

When I was little, I walked from necessity. I spent my childhood outdoors, and to get from home to anywhere you had to walk.

When I got a little older I woke up to the liberating power of walking.

I walked hundreds of miles on the streets of Berlin when it was still fenced in, still somewhat pockmarked from the war, wistful and forlorn. I walked the ruins, I walked the East, I walked the West. I saw it transform over the years, but every time I walk I still discover places I have never seen. I walked there from loneliness, I walked from curiosity, I walked from boredom.

I walked all over London, freshly arrived as a teenage runaway, I kept moving, to grasp the city, to understand England, to understand a culture that was entirely foreign to me and quite hostile. I walked many evenings and nights when I had nothing else to do, when I just wanted to be among people. I walked the East End, I walked the canals, the river, the old industrial areas, the docks, the cemeteries, the Metro-land suburbs.

And I fell in love with New York by walking endless hours until my feet were swollen and blistered, because I couldn’t possibly stop  – the streets were so exciting, so busy, the people so beautiful and odd. I walked the Bronx, the outer reaches of Queens, every neighborhood in Brooklyn from Maspeth to Gravesend, and every block in Manhattan.

Many of my literary heroes used walking for epiphanies, for transformation, for understanding.

Louis Aragon, who wrote so well about the chance discoveries, the peculiar magic and mystery of Paris, creating a larger framework for experiencing the world.

WG Sebald whose books are from the perspective of the solitary walker, the solitary traveler.

I thought nothing of walking 10, 15 miles at a time, and I would have walked longer if my feet wouldn’t give out.

But the point is, I walked because I wanted to.

When I first got a pedometer I was intrigued to learn how much I actually walk. But when I started to set goals everything changed. I began walking for mileage. Five miles every day, six miles every day, eight miles every day. I walked circles in the neighborhood, circles in the park, circles in the cemetery because I had to hit my goal. I’d pace up and down the apartment just hit a round number.

I no longer walked for pleasure, for curiosity, for loneliness. I walked just to walk.

“And once had, the data mind is hard to shake” writes Craig Mod in his essay Paris and the Data Mind, where he describes the abject disappointment of climbing the Eiffel Tower and then realizing that he forgot his Fitbit, making the trek not count.

“Part of me wanted to cab it back to the hotel. Cab it back and clip on the Fitbit and do the walk again. All of it. Mirrored and remapped. Climb the Eiffel steps once more. Ground it. Make it real in the ether.”

I’m trying to rediscover my old way of walking – open to what’s around me, ready to be transformed, open to detours and adventure, unconcerned with mileage.

The basic rules are:

To never walk just for exercise

To walk into the uncharted

To walk with my eyes wide open

To lose myself

“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away … to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost