First Steps

The first day of the new year, the first steps toward a trio of goals that will be anything but easy. Today was filled with getting back to work, adjusting calendars, changing notebooks, cleaning the fridge, doing laundry, checking weight, body measurements... and walking. These first symbolic steps toward 1,000 miles took me to the gym - conveniently located one-tenth of a mile from home - and onto a treadmill for a combined walk of 2.0 miles; fitting, for version 2.0 of me (though to be honest, I couldn't possibly calculate my realistic version number, given 36 years of resolutions, diets, exercise plans, meal trials, and fresh starts behind me).

It wasn't as easy as I'd have liked. I am not familiar with treadmills and don't typically enjoy walking in one place, at the same pace, without any textural variation under my soles or visual variation in my surroundings. Yet this is necessary for tracking my physical distance goals, and it turns out that my pace is slower than I'd predicted, which will mean the walking takes longer all year, or at least until my legs and feet are in better shape for it. But that's okay - just as a journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step, so too will those steps add up in the end and it isn't necessary to walk 1,000 miles the first day.

What is necessary is to just keep walking. So it took longer than I'd hoped at the gym this evening? Maybe I'll head to the gym more than once a day for shorter durations that will add just the same. Everything has a solution, if we're willing to take the steps to get there.