There was a day, many years ago, when I took a long walk in a busy part of the town I live in.
It had been a hard day, a hard week and a hard year.
On that day, it was afternoon and I had gone out for ice-cream at a restaurant. I was alone. I listened to the light drone of music coming from the speakers. The air-conditioning was turned on high, and outside the windows, cars zoomed by. Sometimes, a motorcycle would pause on its speed-trip to drop off a passenger. The sun shone a bright yellow outside. And other than the cars, and the pedestrians crossing the road, nothing much was happening.
I swirled the ice-cream in the plastic cup it had come in. I poked it, nudged it about and felt unsatisfied.
Or, I wasn’t sure if it was dissatisfaction I really felt. There was an undefined feeling that had hung in the air for months around me.
I was afraid of it. Too scared to look it in the face, and yet, it was a feeling that went everywhere with me. Hiding under the brightness of a sunny day, it was ubiquitous in my inner world, vaguely leaching the colour and shape of everything.
Presently, long walks have become my thing, I prefer them in the evenings, when the air is cooler, and the night waits an hour away. But on that day, I hadn’t begun this practice. Taking a walk, just to do so was completely out of my purview. It wasn’t something I would have legitimately considered.
But all good things have a moment they start.
I finished my ice-cream that random afternoon, dusted off the crumbs from the pastry I had bought with it, and left the restaurant. I took a walk on one of the sunniest parts of the day, familiarizing myself with the dips and corners the streets led into, familiarizing myself with a town I had newly started living in. I peeked into neighborhoods the long road branched into; the old houses, some with peeling paint revealing the mud they had been built with.
And the concrete under my feet felt solid, comforting in how it allowed me slow, easy steps forward, to where I was going- wherever that was.
Towards meaning? Towards finding something? Towards putting a name, on the thing that had caused that dissatisfaction that hung like a damp sky over my thoughts.
I am not sure, but I knew I enjoyed the certainty in movement, in the non-difference between the body moving, and the mind reaching forward. I wanted to walk, take myself into a position where all I could do was think…
On That Walk
I found something that I only developed the words for recently. But on that day, the simple act of moving my body; one step in front of the other, brought me a particular peace. Or the faith that I would find that peace.
There is something about how the mind is tied into the body. They are not separate entirely. The position we put ourselves into; in prayer, in sitting down to write, in hurrying up to catch a bus, they influence the directions our thoughts go in. Even if only a little; they are a signal to our conscious and sub-conscious mind that hello, this is what we will be focusing on. Everything else takes a back-seat.
After I left that restaurant, nothing much changed. Not even on the walk, or immediately after it. But a few days, or a few weeks later, I found that in the times when I took a walk, alone with my thoughts and the steady beat of my legs moving one in front of the other, I had a clarity I could not find anywhere else.
That even if all is not healed yet; the homesickness, the longing, the dissatisfaction, at the very least I had that assurance that in the time in those walks, I was cocooned in the certainty of that moment -everything feels alright.
Running Towards Freedom
A famous writer, Haruki Murakami has running as an integral part of his writing process.
He details how he started running in an essay, and one of the things in the piece that I found resonated the most with me was this;
“… I could feel physical changes happening everyday… I felt that… I and my body still had some possibilities left. The more I ran, the more my potential was revealed.”
In my own life, I consider how movement plays out in creativity.
Writing is not a profession that requires much physical strength {except in the fingers I suppose!]. But who says exercise is not something that strengthens the mind?
Who says it is not the mind that determines how far the body will go, how far an idea will go.
Olympic gymnasts have a phenomenon they call the ‘twisties’. Basically, they lose out on the mental dexterity to carry out a complicated gymnastic move. One loses the sense of where their body is in space. Imagine that happening when a gymnast if flying through the air in a complex move.
Something like this is not only discouraging, but also it puts them at risk of serious injuries if they go ahead to attempt the move; their balance is off. The mind simply cannot do what the body has trained so long to do. It happened to Simone Biles, a multi-award winning gymnast in the last Olympics.
I think this thing applies in reverse for myself. For me it is not how the mind is unable to do what the body is fully capable of doing.
When I decided to take up running three years ago, I did it mostly as a physical means to overcome my reluctance about beginning to take my writing seriously.
Deciding to go out and exercise, in a society that generally says “why bother, you are not even overweight” [ I mean, there is a lot to unpack in that statement]. Even more, just choosing to do something out of the ordinary, outside of the realm of my set-in-stone schedule- get up and run.
This helped me to get over a huge amount of the shyness I felt back then around putting my work out as a writer.
It helped, I felt that definite movement forward. Who can ignore the thrill of gradual growth? One thing about exercise is that if you commit to it long enough, and consistently so, you find that you are able to do more than the day before, and the day before that. It keeps moving you forward. Muscles strengthen, and carry you further than you cared to dream.
There was something unexpectedly vital about learning this; that I did not need to wait to be perfect in order to start. You get better by showing up. That is how a person grows.
Now, I don’t run as often as I used to; timing. Not wanting to hurt my back. But I will never stop taking long walks; for myself, for my writing.
I am sure that I could definitely use that adrenaline and encouragement I get after a good run; it feels like jumping over a hurdle with a rocket, like flying. But the steady walking, one foot in front of the other has shown me to think straighter. To go into roads that have fewer hurdles in the first place, or ones that teach a person how to grow and think better, not necessarily use a lot of force, or compulsion to do it.
But it is true what they say, exercise does a body [and a mind], good.
And,
How about you? What “auxiliary” activity have you added to your craft, whatever that may be? Something that has helped you grow and keep your mind clear? How do you strengthen it and get yourself to think of the same old in a new way.
Let me know in the comments.
And take care of yourself. Mind and Body.