When I was working full-time my morning walks were something I always enjoyed, but they were also one more thing that I needed to get done in order to move on to the rest of my day. The walks were mandatory for me because I knew how important they were for my physical, mental and emotional health, but they were also just one more thing in my morning routine that had to be done before I headed to work. Now most days my morning walks are an integral part of living, not just a task to be checked off before I head onto the next thing. Some days it still feels like that, but many days because I don’t have the same time pressure I can choose to extend the time I’m walking if something interests me along the way, and I often get many great insights or am able to unload things on my mind, it feels like it’s just part of my work for the day in this different way of working.
I do find when I’m out walking I am often annoyed at the speeding cars. There are some that are going the speed limit or a reasonable speed for the condition of the road, but there seem to be a lot hurtling down streets that don’t have sidewalks and the speed limit is 25 miles an hour. There are a lot of kids walking or biking to school, people walking their dogs or just out for a stroll and people are flying by at 1,000,000 miles an hour. I definitely put on my old lady ‘get off my lawn!’ hat when these people pass me – shouting and motioning for them to slow down. It seems like teenage boys and older moms are the worst culprits, or maybe those are just the most common drivers that I see in the neighborhood.
On Sunday, I helped my sister deconstruct her old couch and move it down 2 flights of stairs to the street so it could be hauled away. It’s not often you get to attack a piece of furniture with Exacto knives and screwdrivers! Afterwards we assembled her new sectional couch that came in several pieces. Luckily, the instructions were much better than those you get with IKEA furniture, so we were able to put together the couch pretty easily – having good 80s tunes to listen to also helped immensely.
Today Mom and I went through the laundry room and managed to toss out about 2/3 of the things in there. Lots of junk and expired old cleaning products. It feels so satisfying to create order out of chaos and more open space. The weather has been so unsettled today, pouring with rain one minute then blue sky and sunny the next, then back to rain 10 minutes later. I walked to Walgreens to pick up a prescription for my mom and on the way back it started to rain and then hail!
