Walking is built into my life at Wellesley. It seems like it’s a seven or eight minute walk to get anywhere—the library, the science center, the academic quad. The gym and campus center are three or four minutes from my dorm. On days when I work out in the morning, I’ve somehow already spent roughly thirty minutes walking by the time I get to breakfast.
Between going to the gym, class, dining halls, and work, my steps add up. Things are far enough apart that I get some exercise, but not so far that I feel like I’m working hard to get around. I walk without thinking about it.
At home, it takes seven steps to walk from my desk to the bathroom. It’s probably fifty to the kitchen. I can easily go an entire day without walking for more than thirty minutes.
To keep myself from becoming a couch potato, I’ve made a point to walk outside for at least an hour a day. My new winter boots are officially broken in. It’s funny how a walk on streets I don’t normally take feels longer than one down my typical running route. Sometimes I listen to podcasts; This American Life, The Daily, and Radio Ambulante are a few of my favorites. Sometimes I leave my phone at home and focus on not slipping on icy sidewalks or getting run over.
My mom used to always play books on tape in the car, back when books were actually on cassette tapes, but I haven’t listened to one myself in a while. I downloaded the audiobook for Free Food For Millionaires from the library a few days ago and have been taking it with me on walks. It’s a novel by Min Jin Lee, whose book Pachinko I read and loved a year ago. She gave a talk at Wellesley last year, too! One of the characters went to Wellesley. There’s a line saying she missed her home kitchen when she was in college, and my first thought upon hearing that was that she must’ve loved the Lake House kitchen. (All dorms at Wellesley have a full kitchen, as far as I know, but the one in Lake House is huge. It’s got, like, four ovens and five refrigerators.)
Making time to walk has also shown me just how many things are within walking distance of my house. It never would’ve occurred to me to walk to CVS to pick up my prescriptions, but since I was walking anyway, I did, and it was no biggie.
When I’m not out walking, I’m sleeping more than I knew I needed to, struggling through the winter break workout plan, and searching for interesting paid internships. And bopping around the kitchen. I made my favorite soup last night and it was just as good as I remembered. My mom and I saw my favorite singer/songwriter, Lori McKenna, play at Club Passim in Harvard Square last weekend, which was great. I’d been looking forward to it since going to the same concert two years ago. My friend Loey and I just got tickets to see Gretchen Peters play there in March. Merry Christmas to us, indeed.
Next time you hear from me, it’ll be 2020! Enjoy the last few days of the decade.
Home is where the doggos are.