Walking Without Purpose

Follow me through Eugene, OR, on an aimless early morning ramble and thoughts on slow change.

“Just” walking

It’s a little before 6:30 am, and I wake up just before my alarm goes off. My body has settled into a routine. I reach for my phone, turn off the alarm so it won’t wake my husband, and climb out of bed and into the dim kitchen to boil water for coffee. I brush my teeth, wrap up in several layers of clothing under my raincoat, and I’m finishing brewing my coffee when Emily knocks on the door. The ritual is the same, every morning.

Our bodies and minds still feeling fuzzy from the early hour, we head out for our usual walk across the street, past the middle school, and onto the Amazon trail. It’s a convenient loop, half of it paved, half of it bark for the runners who regularly pass us, no matter the weather, no matter the time. We are in Eugene after all, home of the legendary runner Steven Prefontaine. In Eugene, runners don’t stop for rain, don’t stop for hail, don’t stop even for the smoky air that now, more often than not, engulfs the city at the end of the summer almost every year.

Before we each moved away from Oregon, we would take this walk every morning. The same route, the same us. The same eye-rubbing, coffee-drinking, blurry-bodied women, choosing, each day, to start it in each other’s company, choosing, each day, to begin with time outside. We weren’t trying to explore new spaces, we weren’t trying to push ourselves to get up any earlier each day, we weren’t trying to break a streak of how many successive mornings we could get out there and do these.

We were just walking.

Of course, as I look back on it, it seems obvious that while each morning was the same, each morning was different. But it was a slow, gentle and welcoming change, one that you would not notice without being consistent and attentive. The colors changed, the light changed, the weather changed. And, perhaps most importantly, we changed, showing up each day wearing a different version of ourselves, harboring a different disposition to the world around us.

The trail changes with the seasons, but every morning we head down to it, the iconic view of Spencer Butter greeting us in the distance, a dark green mound of fir trees looming above the park. We could walk all the way up to the top of the Butte, if we had the time, but that would take hours. So we turn our backs to it halfway through our walk, leaving the wide, paved trail for the much narrower, winding bark trail.

The trail changes with the seasons, and so do we. In the winter we are miserable, the damp air sinking into our bones, leaving us shivering and clutching desperately at our coffee mugs. The temperature rarely reaches below freezing, but the Oregon winter has a way of getting under your skin with its endless and dark days of drizzle, and often, this walk is the only time I leave the house for the day. Some days, the bark crunches satisfyingly under our footsteps, each step forward leaving a small imprint, a minute trace of us as we walk on the trail glittering with frost. In the warmer months, the trail leaves traces on us instead, our feet collecting red dust and specks of brown bark in our open footwear, and I have to rinse my feet in the tub when I get home.

The trail changes with the season, and we notice these changes every morning, through our clothes choices, through our own changing pace, brisk in the dark, white mornings of winter, soft in the hushed pink hues of early spring, more and more determined as summer marches on, revealing the world to us earlier and earlier each day, until finally there is no more darkness to behold when we walk out the door a little before 7, and the world, finally, has started without us. Our conversations change, as well, as we go through life.

Walking Without Results

Those light and luminous days seem like a hazy, happy dream to me now, as I honker down in the cold New York winter. I find myself wishful thinking of those morning walks, missing the feeling of early sun on my face, missing, dreadfully, the company of my friend, missing the taste of coffee that, somehow, was different and delightful when sipped on those walks from my well-used blue and white flask.

Walking without purpose is a hard thing to do in our capitalistic society. In a world that constantly tells us we should be doing something, going somewhere, growing, making progress, there is no room for walking without purpose. An aimless walk does not yield any « results, » there is no trace of what you have done save your footprint on the terrain you traversed. There are no marks of any achievements. There isn’t a painting, a paragraph written, nothing to brandish up and say « see? I did a thing » (unless, of course, you are tracking steps or tracking your distance). There isn’t even a true physical result, walking doesn’t foster much significant strength or flexibility, or speed (for most people, that is, and I completely acknowledge that for some, taking a walk is a monumental achievement). When you go for walk, it’s just you and whatever company you have selected for yourself, be it a friend or just your own thoughts.

Morning walks are not a practice I can sustain in this phase of my life. I have two young children, and both need attention from the moment we wake up until the end of the day. A solo escape in the early hours of the morning simply isn’t in the cards for me right now. But I’ve practiced this ritual enough to know its benefits, and I have walked and hiked enough to know how important it is to me. Motherhood has deconstructed my life in a way that has left me, as an individual, bare and anxious, certain of little else than the love I have for my family and quite unable to define myself beyond it. But here is, as I write these words, the evidence that walking is one of the practices that makes me who I am today, and I love it for that. And that is enough of a result for me.