Solvitur Ambulando

It is solved by walking. St Augustine

I took my customary walk at Kiara today. I wore a yellow rain slicker and water pooled on the plastic and made little rivulets in front of my face. The air was soggy but clean. And I I pushed gamely on, puffing through the foggy air, feeling my head slowly clear as it tends to do when I'm there.

Many people have asked why I don't simply go to the less difficult course in Taman Tun. But I don't want to. I love this walk. I go alone as usual, and when I start, my head is buzzing with negativity. It's almost like I'm a bystander while everything from low level anxiety to outright murder pulses through me.

I walk and breathe.

Gradually the thoughts settle down. The physical exertion demanded is, well, it's less than it was before. When I first started walking two weeks ago, I would come home exhausted and aching all over. If I sat down, it would be difficult to get up. Basically I would feel like Lot's wife, on looking back.

That good old pillar of salt.

Something inside me kept pushing me to go nonetheless.

No, it was not a weight thing. I've come to terms with how I look now. I find it difficult to care whether people find me attractive or not. (In case you were wondering, they don't. Wasn't my last boyfriend the one who kept me at the treadmill 45 minutes a day in a desperate attempt to shrink me to size? In case you wondering, he didn't succeed).

I have all this work to do. I am supposed to write this report and one article (which was actually due pronto - as I found out when I sms-ed the editor asking her when she wanted it). But I cannot miss out on my walk. I become nervy and irritable when I do so (even more than usual, which is saying something) and my body feels sad and jaded.

Endorphins is where it's at.

So I go for my walk when it rains (like today) or when it's dark (the streetlamps worked one day and didn't the next - but on the bright side, I saw fireflies because it was dark enough for that). I walk and I talk to God and I talk to the people who exist only in my head and I talk to the different versions of my personal dementia. I walk and roses bloom in my hands and music soothes the savage breast and sometimes, I feel words of poetry well up in me.

Not my own, but other people's.

Like today, it was seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness.

And then I thought about how Jackie and I used to distract ourselves from how tired we were feeling on our jogs by reciting Shakespeare. She had memorized 'The quality of mercy is not strained..." and "to be or not to be...". I can't remember what I memorized. But I do remember the both of us doing the different parts from Les Miserables one (was it Sunday?). That was fun...every time we passed someone else, it was Jackie's turn and she was in the middle of one of the more dramatic numbers:

"What have I done, sweet Jesus, what have I done, become a thief in the night, become a dog on the run..."

I have fond memories of running with her, of running with Siti, of running with Shirene, of running with Anna.

Now I no longer run.

I walk and it seems, I walk alone.