The walk is the point

Something's been coming back online inside of me this past year, a sense I'd misplaced somewhere, that I belong to the living world and not only to my work (or inside my head / or locked into a screen).

So this week I did something that, a year ago, I wouldn't have let myself do. I walked into the woods for no reason. Not for exercise, not with the dogs, not with any podcast/news/book content streaming into my ears. Just to be there.

There's a program in Canada now called PaRx (cute branding). Doctors and nurses can write a prescription for nature, two hours a week, the same way they'd write one for anything else. More than twenty thousand of them have signed on, and around two million Canadians have been sent outside on doctor's orders.

What hits me isn't that it works, though it does. It's that we needed the prescription at all. That it took a signed slip from a doctor (an outside authority) to give ourselves permission to stand among trees and do nothing, the way we always knew how to.

There's a voice a lot of us know. It calls rest a waste. It says be useful, earn it, save it for after the work is done, and who in the world do you think you are to just up and go for a walk anyway.

We don't walk into the woods because something in us is broken and the trees will fix it. We go because the noise gets loud in here, and out there it quiets enough that we can finally hear the voice we actually lead from, the one under all the "shoulds".

What would it be like, once this week, to step outside with no reason, and notice which voice goes quiet, and which one you can suddenly hear?

The walk was never something to get back from. It's where the voice you lead from gets a word in.

Mentioned: PaRx →