10 days out of 10, she calmly and cheerfully insisted that we go anyway.  We’d walk four miles around my neighborhood and then she’d go on her way, and I’d discover that—quite to my astonishment—I was actually alive and breathing for one more day.  All thanks to Sue, dragging me out. (May the saints sing her name.)

Walking seems like an absurdly simple exercise, doesn’t it? We often discount it because it is simple, and yet, experts say it’s one of the single best things we can do for ourselves, right up there with eating vegetables and giving up the smokes. I am of the belief that even if you smoke and haven’t touched a vegetable in five years, you ought to be walking.  Maybe even more so.

Not everyone is capable, I get that.  My father has diabetic feet issues and walking is excruciating for him.  There are other conditions, too.  You know if you are one of the people that absolutely should not walk.

If you’re suffering knee or hip or back problems, however, you might find that walking will help.  I had such severe lower back issues when my boys were small that I would sometimes have to sit in a chair to cook breakfast, and as soon as I got them out of the house to school, I’d break down in tears. I resisted anything physical because it hurt. A lot.

A massage therapist who was treating me asked me to start walking around the block a few times a day.  I agreed, tearfully. (I was pretty much tearful about everything.) It was embarrassing, hobbling around my block, half-bent over, three times a day, but within two days, I could stand up straight. By the third, I could sleep again.  By the end of a week, I was walking every day.  There are mornings now when my knee is very painful when I start walking, but it eases by the end.  The fluids lubricate it, or maybe there are just natural painkillers circulating through my blood.  Either way, it feels better.

Walking is easy.  It’s the recommendation of choice for beginning exercisers or anyone who has had an illness or an injury. Most people can get going without any fuss. You don’t need any special equipment and you can do it almost anywhere, and you don’t need any instruction, do you?

Just one half hour a day is enough to get you on the road to health, according to many experts.  It’s great for blood pressure and circulatory problems; it helps keep the lungs flexible and the heart healthy.  It can help control weight and keep your balance steady and strong, since the movement of the legs and hips helps build core strength.

On the mental health level, walking is even more beneficial. Just that half hour a day has been clinically proven to help lower depression in those with mild to moderate symptoms, and has a beneficial effect in those with severe symptoms.  On a more ordinary level, it helps relieve stress, leading to fewer health issues to begin with.  It helps aid sleep.

Finally, walking is enormously pleasurable, especially if you get outside. Treadmill walking is fine, and it does offer all the same benefits as walking outside.  Treadmills are great if you have bad weather or a bad neighborhood (bears or criminals), but I’m going to urge you to get outside if you can manage it at all.  Walking outside has the added benefit of getting Vitamin D into your body.  You can listen to the birds sing or watch people and you will see something in nature every day that will make you feel grateful to be alive.  It’s just how nature works.

Ready to try? Find some comfortable shoes and loose clothing and pick out a route (or rev up the treadmill) and get going. Most people find they can work up to a few miles pretty quickly, even if they’re very overweight or have some health issues.  Start small, but not overly small—aim for at least 15 minutes a day to start, then build from there. Most people can walk a half hour pretty easily even at the start, and that’s the point where you will feel that click of release of tension and feel the happy chemicals swirl into your limbs.  It’s not a big fat rush—just a general sense of ease and well-being.  Aim for every day, or failing that, three times a week to start.

Then come back and let us know how it’s going.

Are you a walker? If not, what gets in your way? (Maybe we can brainstorm solutions.)  If you are, what habits have you developed and what do you like about it? Have you ever seen improvement in a health problem (mental or physical) simply by walking?

No, I just feel that way. I don’t understand why I don’t have any energy. Well, the fact that I’m depressed, kind of like a low-grade systemic infection, will be part of it. My weight is probably part of it (though I’m still a lot keeping off the majority of the weight I lost). Lack of exercise, maybe. Age? (Oh, god, no!).

Eating the wrong foods? The problem is, everyone’s got their own agenda and I just can’t haul stuff around here the way it needs to be hauled. We’ve got some money so I can afford some help for a little while — someone who used to help Taffy go through her mountains of stuff. I do very well with help. As long as I can stay in one place and sort through things I do great.

And I did a good job on the deck, mainly by sitting and using the long-handled roller (I discovered quickly that I couldn’t stand for that long). I have the blisters (on my hands, not my ass) to prove it.

But I hate being so exhausted. I want to do things. I need a plan.
So that’s it for the week. Come up with a plan to get more energy. And get Kim’s help.

So, any ideas about energy? And what are your goals for the week?

My Bad Wolf looks around and says, “This is not how decent people live. This place is a mess. You have asthma and allergies! Okay, okay, Toni sent you an air cleaner and now you’re all excited because you can breathe through your nose for the first time in fifteen years, but really, this is DISGUSTING.”

My Good Wolf stretches and says, “We woke up in all this LIGHT. It’s everywhere and it’s green and there was a squirrel staring through our windows, and when the wind blew, the branches moved and the light danced. We should have moved in here AGES AGO. Gimme a fork, I’m chowing down on all this LIGHT.”

What did you feed your Good Wolf this week?

Today, I was going to talk about swimming, because yesterday in the horrible, horrible heat—which many of you are now experiencing, too—I picked myself up out of my un-conditioned house and went to the pool at my gym. In the summertime, it is packed with children, and even the normally sleepy times are so overrun with teenagers in packs that it can be exasperating to say the least.  I will say more about coming to peace with teen girls and their hundreds of towels per day usage, but I have other things to talk about today.

Like making peace with What Is.

Here’s the thing:  I dislike intense heat intensely.  It’s not humid and I know everybody says that humidity is what makes it hot, but just try walking around happily in sunshine at 7500 feet altitude at 95 degrees.  It’s like having an iron on your skin at all times.

So, yesterday, there I was, too hot and trying to escape it and very grumpy. I decided that I had to do something. One of my life rules is that I am 100% in charge of my own happiness (not that I am particularly good at remembering this), so what could I do to make it better?

I could go swimming. I went. The outside lanes were packed and I didn’t want to go inside, so I plopped myself down in the 95 degree heat and waited.

And waited. And waited. Finally a lane was free and I leapt in—

It was absolute, utter, complete, deepest BLISS.  Cold water pouring through my hair. Blue sky overhead. Blue water beneath.  I’ve always liked it when you open your eyes underwater and see all that wavery light below the surface.  It’s a secret, thrilling world.  Mainly, yesterday, it was cool.  It improved my mood instantly.  I felt like my twelve-year-old self, off to the pool with my siblings for the entire afternoon, not swimming For Exercise, but playing. Paddling around in the water.  Daring ourselves to jump off the diving board. Learning to swim underwater with eyes open….all those things.  One way to be happy is to find that sense of childhood play.

Right this minute, however, there is a big fire devouring a forest just north of my neighborhood.  It started suddenly this afternoon and blustered out of control in less than two hours, already burning down homes and forcing evacuations and triggering the entire city’s PTSD, because it hasn’t been quite a year since the Waldo Canyon Fire burned more than 350 homes in one neighborhood in our city.  I will admit to you that when I came out of the movie theater and spied the smoke, I immediately started crying.  We were all traumatized and it takes some time to get over such a thing.

So I came home and freaked out a little.  This fire is a lot closer to me than the other, only a couple of miles north, and I thought about the people I interviewed in the months after Waldo.  They didn’t think it could happen to them. One man said, “You know, we had four full days. If I’d thought it could really happen, I would have taken more stuff out of the house.”

A couple of miles is not that far. There are two neighborhoods and three really big streets between us and the fire. There are grasslands, where a fire can be contained.  I am not in any danger. I know that intellectually.

But there’s the smoke. There’s the experience.  I put boxes close to any valuable items we’d want to take.  I made sure I remembered where the cat carriers are.  I sat down and let in the memory of enormous cinders falling on my car last summer, on a Tuesday afternoon when I went out to shoot the beautiful fire clouds and got caught in evacuation traffic just as the fire cloud fell.   I was more afraid for my life than I ever had been, ever. It doesn’t help that I was foolish, that I was being a photojournalist, documenting things because that’s what I DO.  It was bad.

Today is not that day.  There is also nothing I can do.  The fire is burning.  It will burn until it is out.

What I do not need to do is leave the television on and check every five minutes to see how many more houses have burned.  I don’t need to go to Freak Out Land and live there until the fire is over.  It’s only going to make me feel like crap. My fight or flight response will live in overdrive and I’ll be exhausted and wrung out and definitely won’t be able to enjoy anything.

Which would be sad, really, to lose three or four days of my precious days to something I have no control over. The news makes me worry.  It also gives me information, but I have control over when and how I receive that information.

The first time I realized I had this control was with the Boston Marathon bombings.  I’m a trained journalist. We live for the coverage. Whenever anything happens, I’m there with CNN, hanging on the blow by blow.  I’ve known for awhile that it wasn’t getting me anything but an ulcer, but it was a hard habit to break.

We are all so connected these days that even though I hadn’t turned on a television or radio or anything, the minute I signed into Facebook, I saw “Oh, Boston!”  The next seven news updates were along the same lines, and I knew something really terrible had happened.  I’d lost several days to grief over the Sandy Hook shootings and this time, I decided not to go turn on the television and see what happened at the Marathon.  I know a lot of runners.  I didn’t want to know. I had control. I could go find something else to do for awhile and let it in when I was ready.

Not that you ever get ready, but still. I chose the time. I decided not to stay with the endless hours of coverage. I found out what happened, turned off the television and cried, and went to bed for a couple of hours.  When I was ready to get more of the story, I allowed that in, too.

I have control over my own happiness.  Terrible things happen, even in our own lives, but this is also true:

When it’s 95 degrees and I’m cranky, I can take myself to the swimming pool and wait for my turn to get in the cool blue water.  I can bring my own towel, since I know the teenagers won’t leave a single one in the locker room.  I can swim and swim and look at the blue sky.

Even when there is smoke in the sky, my cats and dog are asleep in the grass.  The chives are blooming in their wild purple frenzy.  A bird is squeaking somewhere, and a wind—that same wind that fuels the terrible fire—is rustling through an aspen tree.  It cools me, sitting in the shade in the backyard.

Tomorrow, the fire might be bigger.  The wind might shift and bring heavy smoke my way. I might decide I want to put my journals in a box, just in case, even if it’s crazy.  I might go swimming anyway, and when I float on my back, what I’ll see is billowing fire clouds, which are quite beautiful, even if they are destructive.  I might cry for a really good friend who might very well lose her beautiful log cabin in the woods, a place I have spent much time.  I might take pictures.  Maybe I’ll have another little freak-out, and that’s allowed, too.

What tricks do you have for coping with bad days and big disasters?

And oh, splendidly exciting news! I get to be Eulalie McChechnie Shinn, the mayor’s wife, in our production of The Music Man (starring a Tony nominee as Marion). I was made to play this part, and I am going to be so over the top I’ll be floating in the stratosphere. I’m very very excited.

So good things. A book I love to work on, a fabulous part (that fortunately isn’t too taxing) in the musical, time to do things I want to do. My two cousins are playing townsladies, and we’re going to have a blast.
I’ve done pretty well with food last week, even though I don’t see any movement on the scale. I’ll just keep on. And the deck will be ready for Jenny’s furniture and we’ll set up the pool and I am going to snatch pleasure from the slavering jaws of depression, damn it.

Oh, and last week I did a conversation with three other writers on audio books (Julie James, who does a great romantic suspense series about lawyers and the FBI, Pamela Clare who does rom suspense about the I-team plus, I gather, some great historicals, and Jennifer Ashley, who does both wonderful paranormals and some of the best historicals, like THE MADNESS OF IAN MACKENZIE). I tried to behave myself, and if you’re interested in writers talking about audio books, check out this link:http://www.audiogals.net/2013/06/hear-the-authors-talk/#.UbVXO7-1nww

So, my darlings, what’s on your agenda?

What lifted you up this week?