The Longest Short Walk
This past weekend, I tried forest bathing for the first time. In case you are wondering, forest bathing does not involve rubber ducks or nudity. It’s a practice of intentionally immersing yourself in the natural world—of relaxing fully into the rich sensory experience that nature offers. To some extent, this is already how I interact with the forest. Before getting Covid-19, I was the sort of trail runner who could never seem to break a 12:00-minute mile because I paused too often to sing to the deer (it’s fine, you can laugh) or because I just had to take off my shoes and sink my toes into the thick green carpet of moss. This weekend, though, I experienced my first guided forest bathing excursion.
All of it was lovely: sitting beside a babbling creek with the simple instruction to contemplate the water, sitting in a meadow and watching the silvery dew evaporate, and sharing reflections and observations with friends. One part impacted me the most deeply, though. For the final exercise, our guide instructed us to take “the longest short walk of our lives,” by moving only one foot at a time and feeling each new contact with the earth as we followed our meandering trail through the forest.
It was not the longest short walk of my life. As soon as I took my first deliberate step, my whole body churned with the memory of much longer short walks. I walked like that—one foot at a time, slowly, each step deliberate—off and on for my first four months of illness. I couldn’t walk ‘normally’, nor could I explain the reason for my altered gait. It wasn’t the result of fatigue, dizziness, muscle weakness, or shortness of breath—though I was experiencing all of those. Some days, I just couldn’t make my body move in the expected ways. Those long, short walks to the bathroom or my mailbox felt simultaneously as if I was tip-toeing across eggshells and being pulled downward by shin-deep mud. Maybe you know the feeling? In any case, I did not walk that way by choice.
This weekend, though, I chose to walk one slow, deliberate step at a time. By the second step, I was in tears. They were tears of wonder and gratitude that my body could do this by choice now. They were tears of wonder and gratitude at the beauty of the forest, with its first autumnal exhalations. There was also an ache in those tears. I ache for the losses, fear, and heartache of recent months. I ache for the woman who had to brave one faltering step at a time to find her way through them. I am that woman, of course. I think it’s okay to ache for yourself in the same way that would you ache for a friend.
That ache is alive inside the joy of being able to walk in the woods once again. The ache makes the joy richer. The ache is a hug I wish I could give to my past self. The ache is my body’s cellular memory of impermanence. It is the joyful, aching realization of just how lucky I am to be alive, breathing, walking, choosing, and bathing in sensation.
I’ve decided to make slow, deliberate walks like this one a regular ritual. I don’t want to forget my own impermanence. I don’t want to forget how lucky I am.
Is there some ability, comfort, or pleasure that Covid stripped from you, but that you have since regained? Some symptom that burdened you but has finally eased? How do you stay alive to the gratitude and appreciation that this has the potential to stir?