Walking back to happiness - outside the box.

There’s a lot of talk on various social media platforms and elsewhere about the benefits of walking. I’m a great fan and a great believer. Whether it’s improvements in physical fitness and mobility, collateral benefits to mental health from physical activity, or just an opportunity to step away from daily life and empty your mind, there’s a lot to be gained.

I’ve walked for years. All over the place. Wales, the Lakes, the Dales, Scotland,  Spain….  even Africa. But yesterday, like many other days recently, I walked to the chemist and then to Tesco – a journey I would usually have done in the car. Why? Well, I’m carrying a few injuries elsewhere, so walking is an exercise I can pretty much manage without exacerbating existing problems, so it serves as a bit of a work out, a bit of preparation for a longer walk I’ll be doing later this month.

It would have been a lot easier to take the car. It was raining (again!), it was windy. It was a pretty grim day. It took a bit more preparation before I left the house. But that’s where the first ‘win’ happened. I wasn’t restricted or constrained by the ‘easy option’. With the right preparation, equipment and resolve I’d stepped outside (literally!) what might have been ‘expected’ and opened up a whole new field of potential experience and potential benefit. I didn’t have to concentrate on the road or the car immediately in front of me, I could look around, take it all in.  I wasn’t blinkered, I could see things I would never have been able to see had I been in the car.  I didn’t have to worry about traffic lights, junctions, other road users. I was in control, and that realization was empowering, uplifting, liberating even.

The second ‘win’ happened as I stepped out. For some reason unknown to me, my subconscious found ‘clues’ in the surroundings and activity which must have resonated with a previous experience, and in my mind I was immediately transported back to a very specific moment on another walk. It was the afternoon of the 3rd of September 2018 and I was on the ‘Hospitales’ route of the Camino Primitivo in Spain. Berducedo bound, and sitting on top of a mountain, nobody else around, views of thirty miles clear, in every direction, and I was eating a ham and cheese ‘bocadillo’. I felt myself smiling at the memory, and I could almost feel the endorphins flooding through me.

Notwithstanding the benefits of walking, I believe there’s a useful parallel here. It’s along the lines of ‘if you do what you always do, you get what you always got’, but it’s slightly different.

Not taking the ‘easy option’, not doing what is ‘expected’, can not only boost your confidence and put you firmly in control, but it can open up a whole new experience for you, with a corresponding catalogue of new benefits and different options. There’s never just ‘one way’ of doing things. If there was, how the hell would we ever learn to problem solve?

And just as I was transported back to the top of a mountain in Spain by my subconscious, so when we step outside the constraints of the ‘easy option’, I believe our subconscious is liberated to start trying to help, to discover references, resonances which will help us deal with what’s in front of us. I suppose some might call all of that ‘thinking outside the box’, and maybe it is, but it doesn’t happen on its own. You’ve got to give it space to develop, you’ve got to give your subconscious the stimulus and freedom to help.

Go for a walk and think about it.